Textual Transgressions: Confessional Discourse in Late Twentieth-Century Canadian and Québécois Writing

TEXTUAL TRANSGRESSIONS: CONFESSIONAL DISCOURSE IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY CANADIAN AND QUÉBÉCOIS WRITING

by Myra D. Bloom

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of The Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto

Textual Transgressions: Confessional Discourse in Late Twentieth-Century Canadian and Québécois Writing

Myra Bloom Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of The Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto 2014 Abstract

Through close readings of six works of confessional fiction from Canada and Québec, this dissertation argues that the subversive use of confessional discourse can serve as a powerful platform for social critique. It challenges Michel Foucault’s thesis that confession, a practice that he regards as fundamental to our major social institutions such as religion, law, and medicine, is allied to a history of domination and as such serves to trap the subject within existing dynamics of power. Rather than regard confession as an instrument of repression, I reformulate it as a speech act that the subject can embrace in creative ways to resist and subsequently undermine constraining social narratives. My first chapter provides the theoretical basis for this argument, outlining the four main assumptions that underlie confession—the unified subject; guilt/shame; the need for forgiveness; the desire to be readmitted into the community—and introducing the strategies by which writers parodically undercut them. In Chapter 2, I apply this discussion to two texts that portray religion as a repressive force, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Michel Tremblay’s Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra; I argue that the subversion of confessional discourse analogously undercuts the determining power of religious dogma. Chapter

3, by contrast, examines two works that strategically align themselves with religious language and iconography in order to transcend mundane social convention: bpNichol’s Martyrology reacts against entrenched modes of perception, while Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central

Station I Sat Down and Wept reimagines an adulterous affair as a morally viable relationship. My final chapter challenges Derrida’s claim that it is impossible for a text to convey the experience of madness: an analysis of Louise Bouchard’s Les images and Normand Chaurette’s

Provincetown Playhouse, juillet 1919, j’avais 19 ans reveals that, in fact, it is through confession that these writers not only give voice to madness, but, moreover, articulate a powerful critique of the hegemony of rationalism. Ultimately, this dissertation aims to challenge the perception of confession as an inherently normative practice by demonstrating that, when used creatively, confessional discourse can serve as a means of positive self-definition and as an instrument of social critique.

iii

Acknowledgments

It takes a village to write a dissertation. Thankfully, my village is populated by incredibly supportive and encouraging mentors, colleagues, family members, and friends.

I am forever grateful to my supervisor, Barbara Havercroft, whose meticulous eye missed nothing and on whose unfaltering guidance I have relied over the entirety of my doctoral career. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee, Nick Mount and Pascal Riendeau, each of whom brought a unique perspective to this project, and who constantly inspired me to push myself further than I imagined possible.

Thanks to the colleagues who provided feedback and the friends who provided refuge from the rigours of the dissertation-writing process: Sarah O., the older sister I never had; my Toronto family, Heather, Ali, and Sarah L.; Natalie, Catriona, Elizabeth, Kat, Rachel, Sophie, Little Olive, and all the creatures great and small who make my world a brighter place.

I owe a major debt of gratitude to Bao Nguyen and Aphrodite Gardner at the Centre for Comparative Literature for their technical and existential assistance. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the Social Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

This dissertation is dedicated to my family, the rock on which the edifice is built. To Lynn, Leonard, and Simon, whose love, wisdom, and humour have inspired these pages.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... iv!

Table of Contents ...... v!

Introduction: The Confessing Animal ...... 1!

Chapter 1: Theoretical and Historical Background ...... 15!

Roots of Confession ...... 15!

Foucault’s Critique of Confessional Discourse ...... 17!

The Critique of Foucault’s Account of Confession ...... 24!

Confession as a Speech Act ...... 28!

First Tenet: The Interior Conversion and the Myth of the Unified Subject ...... 37!

Second Tenet: The Confessant Feels Guilt or Shame and Desires Punishment ...... 46!

Third Tenet: The Confessant’s Duty Is to Tell the Truth ...... 51!

Fourth Tenet: The Confessant Seeks to Be Readmitted into His or Her Community ...... 55!

Conclusion ...... 58!

Chapter 2: Confessions from the Underground: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Michel Tremblay’s Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra ...... 62!

Introduction to Chapter 2 ...... 62!

The Handmaid’s Tale: Introduction ...... 63!

Confessing in the Underground ...... 66!

(In)visible Woman ...... 70!

Critical Backlash ...... 77!

Dismantling the Conventions of Confession and Becoming an Agent ...... 80!

Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra: Introduction and Historical Background ...... 91!

Structural Parallels ...... 101!

Infelicitous Confessions ...... 106!

Conclusion ...... 121! v

Chapter 3: The Sacred and the Mundane: bpNichol’s The Martyrology and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept ...... 124!

Introduction to Chapter 3 ...... 124!

The Martyrology: Introduction ...... 125!

The Poem as Journal and the Confessional Poets ...... 128!

The Quasi-Theology of The Martyrology ...... 144!

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept: Introduction ...... 157!

The Seduction of By Grand Central Station ...... 160!

Conclusion ...... 179!

Chapter 4: The Impossible Confession of Madness: Louise Bouchard’s Les images and Normand Chaurette’s Provincetown Playhouse, juillet 1919, j’avais 19 ans ...... 182!

Introduction to Chapter 4: Can Madness Speak? ...... 182!

Les images: Introduction ...... 189!

Les images as “Livre impossible” ...... 191!

Provincetown Playhouse, juillet 1919, j’avais 19 ans: Introduction ...... 211!

Provincetown Playhouse as Impossible Performance ...... 216!

Conclusion ...... 242!

Conclusion ...... 245!

Impossible Confessions ...... 245!

Beyond the Foucauldian Confession ...... 249!

Works Cited ...... 257!

Primary Literary Corpus ...... 257!

Secondary Literary Corpus ...... 257!

Theory and Criticism ...... 258!

vi 1

Introduction The Confessing Animal

In the early years of the twentieth century, W.B. Yeats posed a famously apocalyptic question:

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”1

Lurking behind the biblical rhetoric is an acute anxiety regarding the cultural orientation of his own time and place, where “things fall apart” because “the centre cannot hold” (Yeats, 1989: l.3). The French philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the central theoretical underpinnings of the chapters to follow, was similarly concerned with the direction in which he saw society moving.

Foucault can be read as providing a possible answer to Yeats’s query in his characterization of the modern subject as “une bête d’aveu” (1976: 80).2 While he was reacting to trends already present in his mid-twentieth century European milieu, the subsequent, simultaneous explosion of

“reality” programming, on the one hand, and social media, on the other, lend to Foucault’s words an almost prescient quality. That the twenty-first century is an unprecedentedly confessional age is attested to by the tremendous proliferation of vehicles for self-disclosure (Facebook, Twitter,

Instagram, Foursquare…) as well as our fascination with reality television (Survivor, The

Amazing Race, The Bachelor, Intervention…). The famous “confessional booth” gimmick employed by these shows, in which a (generally tearful) cast member stares directly into the camera and delivers their purportedly “uncensored” perspective, recapitulates in overt form the implicitly confessional stakes of the entire production. The same principle holds true of status updates and tweets, direct forms of apostrophe on inherently self-presentational platforms.

1 These are the closing lines of his poem “The Second Coming” (1989: l. 21-22). 2 The parallel with Yeats is somewhat diminished by the translator’s rendering of this line as “confessing animal” (Foucault, [1978] 1990: 80) rather than “confessing beast,” “beast” being another possible translation of the French word “bête.”

If Foucault is correct, the rise of the internet has merely encouraged a cultural disposition that was already characteristic of the Western world prior to the digital age. Indeed, confessional discourse permeates many realms of the mid- to late-twentieth-century experience: it is present in the formalized practices of religion, the juridical system, and the modality of psychoanalytic practice; Sissela Bok refers to these as the domains of “institutional” confession (1984: 88).

Confession is likewise the operative form of a variety of less regimented, what I will call

‘informal’, human interactions: it occurs in relationships between friends and lovers, as well as many works of literature, including the ones under consideration here. Confessional writing can trace its lineage all the way back to St. Augustine, who wrote his famous Confessions at the end of the 4th century.3 In this text, Augustine details his process of conversion from sinfulness to

Christian piety, presenting his indiscretions chronologically from “infant selfishness” (I.vi-vii) through adolescent lust (II.i-ix), theft (II.vi), and a subsequent period of religious experimentation (Books III-VIII) preceding his ultimate conversion to Catholicism (Book IX).

The Confessions are addressed to God, and Augustine makes a point of stating that his human readership is a secondary audience. “Why then should I be concerned for human readers to hear my confessions?” he asks. “It is not they who are going to ‘heal my sicknesses’. The human race is inquisitive about other people’s lives, but negligent to correct their own. Why do they demand to hear from me what I am when they refuse to hear from you what they are?” (X.iii)

This questioning of motive is particularly pressing in light of Augustine’s self- identification as a rhetorician skilled in “the art of using my tongue to gain access to human honours and to acquire deceitful riches” (I.ix). At the same time, Augustine knows that his

3 It is of course possible to trace confessional practices back even further; one critic reaches as far back as the Stone Age, suggesting that “cavemen, drawing on walls the images of animals they had to kill, were in their way confessional artists” (Phillips, 1973: 2). This assertion is based on a much broader understanding of confession than is being developed here.

3 confessions do serve an important pedagogical function. “Good people,” he states, “are delighted to hear about the past sins of those who have now shed them. The pleasure is not in the evils as such, but that though they were so once, they are not like that now” (X.iii). The Confessions thus serve a dual purpose. One the one hand, they detail the author’s indiscretions and do penance by rehearsing them publicly. In that regard, they borrow from the conventions of public confessional practice that existed at the time. On the other hand, they function as a paradigmatic cautionary tale, serving as an example to other Christians. Chloë Taylor argues that they thus

“are more concerned with confessing the truth of the Christian faith than with telling the truth of the author” (2009: 27).

By contrast, Taylor argues that Rousseau, in his eponymous work, aims at biographical precision both owing to the potential to receive “expiation” (2009: 72) for his misdeeds as well as the “masochistic pleasure” he takes in confessing (2009: 85). Writing in the late 18th century,

Rousseau states that his aim will be “montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature; et cet homme, ce sera moi” (5).4 Rousseau’s autobiographical account bears many similarities to Augustine’s beyond its title, including descriptions of adolescent lust and an important character-defining theft. However, whereas Augustine continually refers to the Bible as the grounds of his authority, Rousseau has no such intertext. Rousseau’s authority comes only from his own conviction of his ability to relate his story in a way that will be compelling for his readership. Some critics such as Huck Gutman have gone as far as to argue that the entire genre of modern secular confession is “invented by Rousseau” (1988: 107). Instead of turning inward to gain a better understanding of the ethical life, Rousseau’s project serves as an archaeological excavation of the self; Gutman suggests that Rousseau’s practice “involves not merely the recital

4 “the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man will be myself” (1).

4 of sins but the enumeration of each and every experience that has made one what one is” (1988:

107). Unlike other critics who have written on Rousseau such as Paul de Man, who focuses on the performative power of Rousseau’s confession to exonerate him from his transgressions,

Gutman emphasizes the process through which the author actually constitutes his subjectivity by means of his confession. For him, of primary importance in Rousseau is not necessarily the effect he seeks to elicit from his readership, but rather the work that he is doing to construct his own self-identity. Gutman moreover suggests that writing about the self in this way enables

Rousseau to engage in a dynamic process of self-creation that allows him to escape the social norms by which he feels constrained, beginning to effect “a movement toward liberation” (1988:

118). My aim in this dissertation is to argue for the works on my corpus what Gutman claims for

Rousseau, namely that confessional discourse has the power to construct, rather than simply reflect, subjectivity. Whereas Augustine uses Biblical citations and references to enforce a normative view of morality, writers such as Elizabeth Smart and Michel Tremblay use these same references to take aim at normative social values. Augustine and Rousseau are important touchstones both in terms of their establishing role in confessional literature as well as in the paradigms they articulate.

Arguably the most important touchstone in modern times is the rise of ‘Confessional poetry’, a mid-twentieth century movement that reacted against the impersonality championed by

T.S. Eliot and the New Critics by mining the deeply personal as the basis of artistic production.

Poets such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton not only thematized social taboos such as mental illness and domestic instability, but moreover did so by way of “an insistently autobiographical first person engaged in resistance to the pressure to conform” (Middlebrook,

1993: 635). For women writers in particular, this represented an important feminist intervention into the patriarchal metanarratives that characterized high modernism. According to Diane

Middlebrook, their two-pronged approach involved, first, a challenge to the assumption that women were not intellectual enough to write poetry on a par with their male counterparts, and, second, a rewriting of the female body as an active site of experience rather than a passive target of the male gaze (1993: 641). The Confessional poets greatly influenced the trajectory of contemporary poetry, provoking a turn away from Eliotic autonomy toward the personalized aesthetic of the “postconfessional” writers working in their wake such as Stanley Kunitz,

Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Sharon Olds (cf. Orr, 1993).

The works of fiction, poetry and drama I examine in the following pages are clearly indebted to both their classical and modern forebears. However, it is important to signal that I have chosen deliberately not to focus on self-proclaimed autobiographical or non-fictional texts.

My motivation in doing so is to shift the emphasis from the biographical to the rhetorical: by removing the stakes of referentiality, I am able to focus explicitly on the discourse of confession itself as it (de)constructs the subject. I am particularly interested in the subversive use of this discourse as a strategy by which writers challenge hegemonic norms. This proposition places me at odds with Foucault, for whom confession is the harmful instrument of a fundamentally repressive social regime. In diagnosing the confessional character of modernity, Foucault was actually tracing the contours of a pernicious disease that threatened to subsume every subject under the power of their own internalized social precepts. By contrast, my aim is to demonstrate that, used self-consciously, the act of confessing can serve as a powerful tool of resistance as well as the means of achieving agency.

While there are, as I have noted, many different ways to understand confessional discourse, one inalienable influence is the Christian, specifically the Catholic, tradition of confession. With the exception of my last chapter, which includes a more protracted discussion of the juridical form, my dissertation is largely correlated to the precepts of the Catholic

6 sacrament. The reasons for this emphasis are threefold. The first is a cultural point. The dogmatic specificity of the confession that takes place in the confessional booth has a strong presence in our cultural imaginary, whereas Protestant confessional practices are diverse and less regimented. As Peter Brooks attests, Catholicism gives us “the quintessential form of confession, the form that is most closely linked to our understanding of the self, its private sphere, its inwardness” (2000: 90). Moreover, the role of confession is actually quite different in

Protestant denominations, particularly the Evangelical tradition, where public testimonials function as accounts of a speaker’s conversion to the Christian faith. The Evangelical Christian speaker has already done the work of self-transformation; she is able to address the congregation only after having made the turn towards God and religion. The confession thus becomes a retrospective account of a successful conversion of spirit, a form of ‘witnessing’ more than confessing.5 In the Catholic tradition, by contrast, the confession occurs in the present moment of the speaker’s shame and vulnerability. It is the generative possibilities of this confessional interaction that interest the Canadian and Québécois writers under consideration here.

The second argument for regarding these works against the backdrop of the Catholic tradition is a question of genre: their rhetorical mode necessarily places them in dialogue with a lineage of confessional writers that includes two important figures, Saint Augustine and Jean-

Jacques Rousseau,6 both of whom engage with the Catholic confession. The term ‘confessional’ has been used to refer to a specific twentieth-century movement in poetry as well as to all

5 George M. Marsden describes the process of conversion as “analogous to a man struggling in the water (lost sinner) who grasps hold of a rowboat (regeneration), climbs aboard and rests in the boat itself (sanctification). Then he is in a position to rescue other struggling men (service). Missions and witnessing [are] the principal manifestations of such service” (2006, 78). 6 Although Rousseau’s Confessions is secular whereas Augustine’s eponymous work is religious, the former is clearly in dialogue with the latter and thus engaging with the Catholic form of confession, if only to react against it. As one critic asserts, “Rousseau wrote and entitled his Confessions as a refutation, however veiled, of a specifically Catholic and Augustinian conception of man” (Archambault, 1987: 6).

7 manner of self-reflexive writing, and there is thus no consensus as to which works are constitutive of the genre of ‘confessional literature’. Some critics view it as a subset of autobiography (Anderson, 2001: 24; Smith and Watson, 2001: 146), whereas others conversely regard it as the master category to which autobiography belongs (Tambling, 1990: 9). Still others place it in a class unto itself, defining it in terms of its distinctness from other related genres such as the autobiographical memoir (Coetzee, 1985: 194). The lack of scholarly consensus is not so much an oversight as a testament to the diversity of practices that operate in the confessional mode. However, most critics agree that the two eponymous Confessions of Augustine and

Rousseau, which detail the transgressions of their authors, are important touchstones; while most critics emphasize the distinction between the religious orientation of the former and the secular mode of the latter, they generally agree that both texts were essential in establishing a new genre of self-condemnatory writing.

The final argument for the importance of Catholic confession as a structuring mode is the historical point that the Catholic Church has played an important role in Canadian society. This is particularly true in Québec, where it served as a dominant cultural force up to the 1960s, until the Quiet Revolution brought about dramatic secularization and modernization. Maurice

Duplessis, Premier from 1936-1939 and 1944-1959, believed that the Church should have direct oversight of education, healthcare, and social services. Although church and state were officially separate, “in actual fact the church was deeply involved in promoting and ordering social life” and had a “considerable influence” on the operation of the government (Baum, 1986/87: 438).7

The Duplessis era, known in French as la Grande noirceur, was characterized by conservatism and social repression. When a liberal government was finally elected in 1960, the social climate

7 Although Duplessis is the name most commonly attached to this period in the history of Québec, it is important to note that the Church’s oversight of the educational system and other social services predated his leadership.

8 began to change drastically, precipitating a cultural shift that became known as la Révolution tranquille, the Quiet Revolution. Writers were at the vanguard of the revolution; one critic notes that the literature of this period “se présente comme un projet urgent qui est tout à la fois le reflet et le vecteur des aspirations collectives à la base de la Révolution tranquille” (Biron, 2007:

361).8 This revolutionary spirit is reflected in the theatrical practice of Michel Tremblay, who engages directly with issues of language and self-identity in the wake of this social transformation, both in his depiction of the working class sociolect of joual as well as in his treatment of controversial themes such as (homo)sexuality and religious conservatism. Normand

Chaurette (1981) and Louise Bouchard (1989), whose texts were written in a later period of

Québécois literature, are nevertheless indebted to the formal innovations taking place in the period immediately following the end of la Grande noirceur. The use of Catholic imagery in the latter’s work must be regarded against the horizon of the sociopolitical landscape of the late twentieth century in Québec.

Although the history of Catholicism in English Canada has not been so socially determining, a 2010 Pew Forum study confirms that it remains the most popular religion in the country, with approximately 42% of the population self-identifying as Catholic (Todd, 2013); this makes Canada the country with the 18th largest Catholic population in the world. The private dialogue between penitent and priest that takes place within the confessional booth is closely connected in our cultural imaginary with the concept of confession. Even though writers in

English Canada do not have the same religious history as their Québécois counterparts, the conventions of Catholic confession nevertheless make appearances in their writing, where they engage with confession both as a religious as well as a writerly practice. Many of these texts

8 “presents itself as an urgent project that is at the same time the reflection and the impetus for the collective aspirations at the foundation of the Quiet Revolution” (Biron, 2007: 361). [Translation mine]

9 negotiate the relationship between religious and literary confession by presenting particular scenes of confession within a larger confessional framework. Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand

Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, for example, takes the form of a literary confession and to that extent participates in a tradition of writing about the self; at the same time, it contains specific quasi-religious exhortations: “Absolve me, I prayed, up through the cathedral redwoods, and forgive me if this is sin. But the new moss caressed me and the water over my feet and the ferns approved me with endearments” (24). In fact, one feature shared by many of the texts under consideration is that not only are they confessional in form but they moreover contain overt references to religious practice. Margaret Atwood and bpNichol invent, respectively, a theocracy and a martyrology; Louise Bouchard and Elizabeth Smart’s protagonists define their identities by way of Biblical tropes; Michel Tremblay’s characters speak of the pre-fabricated identities forced upon them by conservative values as well as their attempts to break free of their constraints.

It is important to point out that whereas all of the texts considered here are either narrated in the first person, or, in the case of the dramatic works, communicated to the audience through the use of monologues, this directness is only one of the hallmarks of confessional discourse or the confessional genre. Both of these concepts are nebulous, and each scholar seemingly adheres to his or her own idiosyncratic definition. My own formulation is very close to that of Chloë

Taylor, who defines confession as “statements which claim to explain the being of the subject who is speaking, which are introspective, which utterances change her […] and which are told despite claims of repression, or with difficulty and shame” (2009:8). The genre of confessional literature, by extension, features a first-person narrator who adheres to, or, as we will see here, overtly challenges, the postulates Taylor outlines. It is clear that for these six writers, working out of different social contexts in various genres, the choice to use the confessional mode is

10 deliberate. For Jeremy Tambling, the distinction between a text written in the third and first person is that the latter immediately evokes a character’s psychological complexity: “It is not just that the text using ‘I’ invests the persona with an autonomy denied to characters described in the third person who must earn that imaginary plenitude of existence, but the ‘I’ sets up the conviction that there is an inner life to be reported and that the concept of interiority is relevant”

(Tambling, 1990:18-19). Tambling draws our attention toward the importance of investigating the formal significance of first-person confessional discourse. I will accordingly demonstrate in my first chapter how contemporary writers both use and subvert this “I,” challenging the

Augustinian concept of interiority and replacing its model of subjectivity with a discursive view of the subject.

Rather than assume that the confessing self is a stable entity, as Augustine does, I argue that the six texts under consideration adopt a discursive view of the subject, in keeping with the insights of Butler and Foucault. At the same time, I position myself in opposition to the latter critic, for whom practices of self-disclosure are inherently reifying rather than emancipatory.

Against Foucault, then, my first chapter reconfigures confession as a particular form of speech act, in the sense explored by J. L. Austin (1962) and his inheritor John Searle (1970), which, far from revealing the essential truth at the core of the subject, actually constructs the very self it purports to describe. The space between the content of what is said and the manner in which it is articulated provides fertile ground for an exploration of the power dynamics that attach to the art of confessing. For a standard confession to be ‘felicitous’, J. L. Austin’s word for successful, certain criteria must be in place: the speaker must come to confession in the right spirit, confess truthfully and according to the established formula, and gain the absolution of a priest. I demonstrate how writers parody the form of confession by rejecting the four postulates that, as I discuss in my first chapter, characterize a felicitous confession: the interior conversion of the

11 unified subject; the presence of guilt and shame; the need for truth; the desire to be absolved and readmitted into one’s community.

In essence, the chapters that follow can be regarded as variations on this theme of confessional infelicity, each of them addressing it from a slightly different angle. Chapter 2 is set in “the underground,” the liminal space that results from marginalization, but, nevertheless, simultaneously provides a sheltered place from which the disenfranchised are able to claim a voice. It is from this ambiguous rhetorical position that the protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s

The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred, articulates an equally ambiguous and unstable confession. This becomes her most important tool of resistance against a despotic theocratic regime: ironically, her confession turns against institutional religion. The central characters of Michel Tremblay’s

Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra are similarly confined to the margins on account of their extreme piety, on the one hand, and hyperbolic sexuality, on the other. Tremblay correlates their status as outsiders to the pathological effects of a repressive society. We encounter them in a kind of indeterminate space that encodes their existential stasis: it is from this vantage that they stage their infelicitous confessions, abnegating themselves of their pathological guilt, railing against God while simultaneously pleading for divine intervention, and, ultimately, establishing

Tremblay’s damning critique of the legacy of the Catholic church.

Whereas Chapter 2 focuses on the critique of religious discourse, Chapter 3, by contrast, discusses writers who treat the language of religion with sincerity. Both bpNichol’s The

Martyrology and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept lean heavily on religious images and motifs in their respective pursuit of the transcendence of the mundane.

Nevertheless, their idiosyncratic appropriation of this iconography marks a significant departure from its ecclesiastical origin: for bpNichol, who invents a pantheon of saints derived from fractured words (e.g., St Rain, St Orm), language and spirituality are indissociable. His

12 subversive use of confessional discourse is not meant to critique religion, but neither is it meant to shore up a connection to the institution of the Church; rather, it functions as a way of achieving a higher form of poetic expression. Similarly, Elizabeth Smart’s extensive use of religious intertexts is directed at a goal that is entirely extrinsic to their original purpose, namely, the legitimation of an adulterous love affair. By ‘seducing’ the reader (and here I rely on

Shoshanna Felman’s idea of narrative ‘seduction’) into accepting the beauty of her protagonist’s love over the petty strictures of conventional morality, Smart mobilizes confession against the normative forces of social convention.

My final chapter serves as a counterpoint to the previous chapter’s discussion, drawing once again from Shoshana Felman to position her concept of the ‘madness’ of the text as the antithesis to ‘seduction’. If seduction entails producing “une illusion référentielle” (1980: 39),9 the “madness” of the text, by contrast, emerges when a gap opens between performance and utterance, creating a zone of narrative infelicity (1978: 347-348). My discussions of Louise

Bouchard’s Les images and Normand Chaurette’s Provincetown Playhouse, juillet 1919, j’avais

19 ans both explore the way that the madness thematized within the text is recapitulated by the unstable rhetorical foundation on which it rests. In confessing her madness, the speaker of

Bouchard’s text simultaneously denies her madness, preventing the reader from attaching her discourse to a stable subject. Chaurette’s play is arguably more extreme in subverting its rhetorical position, to the point that it becomes unclear where the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the text are to be located. The madness of his central character is likewise overtly challenged, this time by the suggestion that it is primarily a legal strategy and not an

9 “a referential illusion” (1983: 31)

13 illness, as we are led to believe. In both cases, the impossibility of reducing the signifier

“madness” to a definite signified resists a kind of essentialism that both Foucault and Derrida decry as the instrument of a hegemonically rational worldview.

In all of the texts under consideration, the speech acts by which they subvert the confessional formula are effective interventions because they modify its structures from within, operating by way of ‘repetition with variation’ (Butler [1990] 2008: 185). In doing so within the bounds of the text, these six writers can be seen as exploiting one of the features of Catholic confessional practice: the sheltered space of the confessional booth. Peter Brooks argues that the

“secret transaction carried out in the closed space of the curtained and grilled confessional box

[…] abolish[es] the usual confines and censorships of everyday life” (2000: 89). Of course, as

Foucault and others have pointed out, this space is fraught with power dynamics, the coercive nature of which will be considered at length in the chapters that follow. Nevertheless, it is the

‘potency’ (Brooks’s term) of this space to which I am arguing writers appeal within the sheltered space of the poem, play or novel. My contention is that the safe space of the fictional work is analogous to the protected space of the confessional booth. It is within this space that these self- proclaimedly ‘fictional’ texts (a generic designation that, we will see, is often blurred) react against forms of repression that are nevertheless very real.

In terms of the larger goals of this project, by contrast, the segregation of the confessional booth proves a wholly inappropriate metaphor. In choosing texts from English and French- speaking Canada, my aim is to foster conversation between “two solitudes” that, from a literary perspective, often have very little to say to one another. Les images, problematically, remains untranslated, and thus wholly inaccessible to the majority of Canadians. While many of

Chaurette’s plays have in fact been published in translation, and in spite of his critical recognition in Québec, there is very little attention paid to his work among English-speaking

14 scholars, not to mention the Anglophone public at large. In the true spirit of comparativity, I have deliberately chosen to build this project around a topic that transcends linguistic boundaries, one that is in fact enriched by regarding the problematic from different cultural contexts. I am also endeavouring to overcome the conventions of the traditional CanLit corpus by placing less canonical writers (Bouchard, Chaurette, Nichol, Smart) into conversation with their more established counterparts (Atwood, Tremblay).

Man (and, of course, woman) may very well be a “bête d’aveu,” but, as we will see, his

(her) rhetoric is much subtler than is accounted for by Foucault in his reductionist view of confession. In tracking this beast over six very different texts and contexts, a more complete picture emerges of the many insidious norms by which the subject can become entrapped, and of the intrepid strategies by which she eludes their grasp.

Chapter 1 Theoretical and Historical Background Roots of Confession

In order to understand why confessional discourse enjoys such a privileged status in contemporary Western culture, it is instructive to trace it back to its origins. That the two very separate spheres of religion and law share the practice of confession is no accident; in the Middle

Ages, before the modern separation of Church and State, religious transgression and civil disobedience were one and the same (Hamilton, 1981: 16). Within the Western Catholic tradition, if a person sinned against God they by extension sinned against a human community organized under the banner of Christian faith, for “medieval Catholicism was not simply a system of belief, it also presented men with a comprehensive explanation of the world in which they lived” (Hamilton, 1981: 18). Likewise civil disobedience was considered an affront to the principles of Christian life as set out in the Old and New Testaments, and therefore represented a sin against God. This twinning of legal and religious enforcement is best embodied in the fearsome Medieval Inquisitor, tasked with job of rooting out heresy and offences against canon law as of the twelfth century A.D. (Hamilton, 1981: 31). Significantly, the official incorporation of confession into religious dogma is contemporaneous with the rise of the Inquisition; it is in this period, as Peter Brooks notes, that the ideas of “moral cleansing” and “moral punishment” became connected (2000: 2). Confession did exist in Christian doctrine but was not an obligatory profession of faith until the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 dictated that Roman Catholics must confess once yearly at Eastertide. Among the mandates of this council, convened in Rome under

Pope Innocent III, was to address the problem of heresy (Hamilton, 1981: 31). The insistence upon a yearly confession served, in addition to its doctrinal importance, the diagnostic function of revealing heretics who failed to appear in church. Moreover, individuals were encouraged to

16 confess their fraternization with known heretics, thereby denouncing them, and were granted immunity if they did so within a certain circumscribed period (generally a week) (Hamilton,

1981: 42). Individuals who confessed during this period were ordered to do penance rather than punished.10 Those penances enjoined by the Medieval Inquisition differed from the standard penance in that they were legally enforceable, a fact which emphasizes the common origins of religious and legal confession.

Although the Inquisition was purportedly an instrument of truth and righteousness, its harsh techniques of coercion resulted in gross miscarriages of justice. On May 15, 1252, Pope

Innocent IV published the papal bull Ad extirpanda, which legally sanctioned the use of torture as an inquisitorial technique. The Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment cites this bull as the origin of institutional torture in Europe (Levinson, 2002: 1625). Its legacy is thematized in

Arthur Miller’s famous play The Crucible, which takes place during the Salem witch trials of the

17th century. Miller explores the double bind into which people falsely accused of witchcraft were placed: either they confessed to a crime they did not commit and risked the consequences of this indictment, or else they were automatically hanged.

The threat of torture or death resulted in many false confessions, a problem that ultimately contributed to the outlawing of torture as a valid means of interrogation. As the hegemony of the Church began to give way to the Age of Reason in the 18th century, intellectuals such as Voltaire and Jeremy Bentham publicly denounced what they saw as a practice that was not only cruel but moreover antithetical to establishing the truth (Levinson,

2002: 1625). Torture was abolished in continental Europe in the mid-18th century. In 1791, the

10 Bernard Hamilton notes that penances are specific forms of symbolic punishment designed to give “temporal satisfaction to God” and thus free the sinner “from the guilt and damnation which his sin had incurred” (1981: 50). Hamilton points out that penances could be very harsh, such as a public flogging or a pilgrimage to distant shrines (1981: 50).

17 government of the United States ratified the Fifth Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which states that “no person shall be compelled in a criminal case to bear witness against himself” (Levinson,

2002: 302). The famous ‘Miranda rights’ were instituted in 1966 as a means of guaranteeing a suspect’s Fifth Amendment rights not to incriminate himself involuntarily (Brooks, 1996: 115).

The strict protocol that govern police interrogations today are meant to guard against the coercive potential inherent in the practice of eliciting a confession. However, as Peter Brooks notes, even the strictest of guidelines cannot guarantee that the interaction that takes place between interrogator and suspect remains free of threat, coercion, or other dynamics of domination. He writes,

Everything we have observed in confessions, “real” or “fictional” (the borders tend to blur here) tends to suggest that confessions rarely are products of a free and rational will. They arise in situations of constraint, whether physical or psychological. They are motivated by inextricable layers of shame, guilt, disgrace, contempt, self-loathing, propitiation and expiation. Their ‘truth’ is often not straightforward but deviated from its apparent referent: a truth of performance and dialogue, a truth created by the bond of confessant and confessor and the confessional situation. (1996: 63)

Although Brooks makes many points here to which I will return later in this chapter, most germane to the present discussion is the attention he draws to the performative nature of the confession. The “situations of constraint” that arise in these moments of performance are precisely the grounds on which Michel Foucault takes aim at confession as an expression of internalized domination.

Foucault’s Critique of Confessional Discourse

Foucault is without a doubt the most important twentieth-century critic of confession. Although torture had been outlawed by the time he was writing, Foucault nevertheless maintains that the

18 power dynamics that had engendered confessional discourse in the medieval period persist in both institutional and informal confessions. In the place of outward forms of intimidation and punishment, he argued that the modern subject has unconsciously incorporated these techniques of domination into his inner psychological landscape. Foucault’s condemnation of confession as

“une forme de pouvoir-savoir” (1976 :77)11 emerges out of his genealogical linkage of modern institutions such as law, medicine and psychoanalysis with the medieval practices of coerced confessions. The injunction to confess oneself is so powerful that Foucault regards confession as the modality of the modern subject, whom he calls “une bête d’aveu” (1976: 80).12 In his

History of Sexuality, he argues that confessional discourse proliferates “dans la justice, dans la médecine, dans la pédagogie, dans les rapports familiaux, dans les relations amoureuses, dans l’ordre le plus quotidien, et dans les rites les plus solonnels” (1976:79),13 where it functions to subordinate the individual to the power of a (usually sexual) norm.14 The imperative to confess is so strong that, far from requiring the devices of torture to elicit it, we do not even perceive it as a constraint, but rather as the basic precondition of our being. For Foucault, confession is a hallmark that inaugurates modern subjectivity, because the internalization of social norms is not a phenomenon that was present in the ancient world.

11 “a form of knowledge-power” (Foucault, [1978] 1990: 58). 12 “confessing animal” (Foucault, [1978] 1990: 80). 13 “in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites” (Foucault, [1978] 1990: 59). 14 Although Foucault’s emphasis is predominantly sexual, this is not the specific focus of this chapter. I will pay particular attention to the dynamics of sexuality in my discussions of the writers who thematize it explicitly, namely Margaret Atwood, Michel Tremblay, and Elizabeth Smart.

Although confessional discourse can be seen in the culture of the ancient Egyptians and

Greeks whose practices Foucault examined,15 the forms that persist in our culture come to us by way of the Christian tradition, which differs from that of the ancients in several important regards. Central to the Christian conception of confession has been the sense of guilt that motivates the confessor to acknowledge his sin, as well as the desire to be absolved and thus reintegrated into the community. This inner knowledge of guilt, shame, and the deviation from the norm differentiates Christian confession from the practice of the ancient Greeks. As Chloë

Taylor summarizes, men in ancient Greece would confess to a spiritual director not out of a desire to absolve themselves of sin or guilt, but rather as a component of a deliberate self- fashioning “in keeping with the principles of the ethical life” (2009: 14). Their practice displays a certain exteriority, as they are motivated not by an inner feeling tied directly to the commission of the sin, but rather by an intellectual or philosophical project. The deep feeling of guilt and transgression is a uniquely Christian phenomenon that is rooted, Foucault argues, in the early alliance between religious and judicial enforcement of discipline. Whereas the Greeks regarded confession as an important step in a dynamic process of self-fashioning, Christian doctrine made the practice a basis for salvation and thus, Foucault maintains, introduced the element of disciplinary power.

From this early alliance between guilt, salvation and power, Foucault argues that confession has evolved into the most important means of articulating the subject’s essence.

Modern subjects place so much emphasis on confession that it becomes the vehicle through which we are able to access ‘truth’; thus, he says, it belongs to the order of science (1976: 77).

15 Foucault studied the practices of the ancient Greeks in a series of lectures he delivered at Dartmouth College in November, 1980. See, for example, “Subjectivity and Truth” and “Christianity and Confession” (2007: 147-167; 169-195).

As such, it is seen to possess the same authority as other facts that can be proven empirically: statements about the self that take the form of confession, such as those one makes to one’s therapist, become elevated to the status of objective fact. Perhaps even more insidiously, confession thus becomes the subject’s path to freedom, because in addition to providing access to the truth, we likewise perceive it as the means by which the subject frees himself from the moorings of a guilty conscience. However, Foucault argues that this freedom can only ever be illusory, because the subject is inevitably bound by the strictures of the institution whose norms he senses himself to have violated (1976:81). What a person really confesses is his awareness that he is in contravention of a social norm, which, according to Foucault, is meant to repress his personal freedom; the lofty ideals of freedom and truth are thus mere obfuscations of a system of domination. Institutions such as law, medicine and psychoanalysis use confessional discourse to entrench the relations of power and domination that compel us to confess ourselves in the first place. Characterizing this as a distinctly modern idea about confession and subject-formation,

Foucault looks back with what can be regarded as a certain nostalgia to the ancient Hellenistic world, in which the mantra “take care of yourself” had not yet been superseded by the modern slogan “know thyself” (1988:22). For Foucault, confession is the technology par excellence of a culture in the thrall of “pouvoir-savoir” (1976:77).

Foucault’s critique of modern institutions such as medicine and law must be situated within a critical discourse surrounding confession that was taking place in the twentieth century, especially within psychoanalysis. In 1925, Theodor Reik, a disciple of Freud, published a book entitled The Compulsion to Confess and the Need for Punishment. He argued in keeping with the psychoanalytic model of his mentor that repression, guilt and the desire for punishment are the result of early childhood socialization (Israel, 2006: 728). For Reik, the symptoms that a patient presents to the analyst take the form of an “unconscious confession” (Reik, 1959: ix); it is the job

21 of the analyst to allow the patient to overcome feelings of guilt and repression by encouraging her to confess herself within the controlled setting of the analytic encounter. Therefore, although the overwhelming desire to confess can be seen as pathological when it interferes with ordinary life, the confessional transaction that takes place within the psychoanalytic setting is regarded as curative. Foucault of course denies this curative potential on the grounds that the subject is forced into a subordinate role; rather than allow the subject to tell us his truth, we ‘extort’ it from him and moreover insist that his discourse be expressed “dans des formes scientifiques” (1976:

87).16 The patient speaks in a code that is only intelligible to the diagnostician who has the training to decipher the hidden message contained within. Whether in the legal, religious or medical context, Foucault rejects the idea that certain people can be vested with the power to know others more thoroughly than they can know themselves. He moreover dismisses the modern hermeneutic project of uncovering the self, whose imperative he describes as “to know oneself, to tell the truth about oneself, and to constitute oneself as an object of knowledge both for other people and for oneself” (2007:151).

The hermeneutic project that Foucault decries “involves a particular form of truth production, constructing the truths of selves in its quest to ‘reveal’ them, while truth is always a product of power” (Taylor, 2009: 78). It is equally problematic because the interlocutory context creates an unequal balance of power. The person to whom one confesses “n’est pas simplement l’interlocuteur, mais l’instance qui requiert l’aveu, l’impose, l’apprécie et intervient pour juger, punir, pardonner, consoler, réconcilier” (Foucault, 1976: 83).17 The historical evolution of

Catholic confession from a dialogue conducted with a chosen spiritual advisor to a formulaic

16 “in scientific terms” (Foucault, [1978] 1990: 65). 17 “not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes it and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile” (Foucault, [1978] 1990: 61-62).

22 interchange with a priest emphasizes the imbalance of power that exists between the two parties.

Annemarie Kidder argues that

By confining confession and penance to the auspices of the clergy (except among monastics) [after the 5th century], the church assumed increasing influence in the shaping of the moral behaviour and the spiritual formation of its members. At the same time, Christians could no longer choose their own confessors or serve as official confessors to others based on spiritual kinship, calling, and gifts of discernment. This restriction, resulting from confession’s sacramental status, introduced an unnatural split whereby spiritual direction and soul guidance was severed from confession—spawning a separation of roles between clerical confessor and lay spiritual director that persists to this day. (2010: 35)

In Kidder’s account, the role of priest became divorced from that of spiritual advisor when confession became incorporated into doctrine as a sacrament. The role of the priest was no longer to provide sustained guidance to his disciple, but rather to officiate and ensure the success of a necessary Christian ritual. Foucault regards the movement away from spiritual direction as emblematic of the unequal power relations that eventually came to define confessional discourse, where the speaker is placed in a subordinate relation of power to his interlocutor; the latter in turn represents the larger social norm the penitent feels himself to have violated. For Foucault, then, the confession of a wrongdoing ultimately represents the capitulation to a hegemonic norm.

Moreover, although a confession is presumed to refer to a deeply personal inner truth, it is always marked by the dialogic context in which it is articulated. Peter Brooks’s observation concerning the power dynamics of legal confession extends to all confessional situations, where

23 a power differerential inevitably exists between confessant and confessor.18 This imbalance can be problematic because, as Bok argues,“[s]tudies have shown that when self-revelation flows in one direction only, it increases the authority of the listener while decreasing that of the speaker”

(1984: 80). The truth that is produced as a result of the exchange between two unequal parties is inevitably framed in the discourse of the more powerful interlocutor. In order for a confession to be ‘successful’, the confessant must speak a language the interlocutor understands, which

Foucault maintains is the language of social convention.

As I will argue in subsequent chapters, the reader of a confessional text is immediately forced to negotiate this dynamic as the recipient of a character’s confession. Björn Krondorfer asks a series of questions that attest to the ambiguous and multiple functions of both reader and text: “[Is] the reader the confessor, the one who hears a confession? Or does the text itself take on the function of the confessor ? Or is the confessor the imagined Other in the text, like God in

Augustine’s Confessions?” (2010: 12) Many authors, fully aware of the imbalance of power, work consciously to subvert the traditional roles of confessor and confessant by destabilizing the hallmarks of the confessional scene. Margaret Atwood, for example, reserves until the very end of The Handmaid’s Tale the important information that the supposed confession is actually a collage of data recorded on a set of tapes that has been curated by an academic for the sake of his research. The reader’s authority is thus undermined as it becomes clear that there are no stable references within the world of the novel, an insight that potentially extends beyond the parameters of the book into the problem of confession as a whole. Rejecting the discourse of

18 The term “confessor” can be used to describe both the person who confesses as well as the person to whom she confesses. Thus, in order to avoid ambiguity, I am going to use “confessant” to name the person doing the confessing and reserve “confessor” for the person to whom she confesses.

24 truth that attends to confession is one important strategy by which writers drive a wedge in the pouvoir-savoir nexus.

The Critique of Foucault’s Account of Confession

Although Foucault is correct in highlighting its problematic aspects, I agree with Chloë Taylor’s argument that his discussion is based on a very narrow view of confession. Absent from his analysis is a consideration of confessions that express a positive emotion such as love, or ones that are deliberate fabrications. Taylor takes issue with Foucault precisely for his refusal to explore the possibility that creative forms of self-fashioning, what she calls the “abuse of the autobiographical mode,” can be “self-transformative in a positive way” (2009: 82); she deconstructs Foucault’s assumption that all confessions are “propositionally true”, suggesting that “false confessions become true of the subject in a performative or experiential sense” (2009:

80). Although the confession one makes may not correspond to empirical reality, the very fact of making it, Taylor argues, constitutes a truth in its own right. An example of an unconscious

‘false’ confession, in the psychoanalytic context, is the hysterical symptom, which Freud identifies as a manifestation of a deeper truth the patient has repressed.19 In the context of critical theory, de Man’s analysis of the self-aggrandizing motivation behind Rousseau’s ostensibly self- condemnatory account demonstrates that whereas the ‘constative’ or empirical truth of the confession is subject to debate, the very act of confessing it constitutes a performative gesture whose significance is as great as the content of the confession itself (de Man, 1979: 278-303).20

19 Among Freud’s most famous cases is that of Dora (1953:64). 20 J.L. Austin’s distinction between constative and performative utterances will be discussed in more detail below. For the time being it suffices to note that a constative utterance reports fact, whereas a performative utterance brings about a certain state of affairs. The difference is between “doing and saying” (Austin, [1962] 1990: 47): to use Austins’s own example, when I say that a person is running, it is possible to ascertain whether or not he is running through empirical evidence. When I apologize, on the other hand, the very act of speaking the words is integral to

Another example of false confession, this one deliberate, is James Frey’s memoir A

Million Little Pieces, published in 2006. Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of this astounding tale of drug addiction, incarceration and ultimate personal triumph pushed the book to bestseller status.

Ultimately, when it was revealed that many of the details had been exaggerated or fabricated outright, Oprah withdrew her endorsement and attacked Frey on her show, stating that she felt

“really duped” (“Oprah’s Questions,” 2006). Before this definitive repudiation, however, Oprah had vacillated; when the charges against Frey first surfaced, she initially stood by him, even calling in to the Larry King Live show to argue that “the underlying message of redemption still resonates with me” in spite of its factual inaccuracies (“Oprah Goes on the Attack,” 2006). Her point at the time, which Frey himself cited in defense of his decision to exaggerate the facts in his memoir, was that even if the story did not contain Truth, in the constative sense, it could nevertheless, through its performance as good fiction, contain the kind of universal truths to which art aspires. Frey riposted that the European market did not care whether or not the memoir was constatively true, and that America’s fixation on the empirical veracity of its content was owing to an inherent cultural ‘puritanism’ (Barton, 2006). In other words, Frey blamed the

American fixation on truth with an embedded Christian system of values.

Frey’s exaggerated memoir demonstrates the limitations on Foucault’s commitment to the alliance between confession and hegemonic norms. Frey actually went to great lengths to magnify his transgressions for the sake of a good story. One gets the sense that Frey’s contention that his story is intended as a cautionary tale to guide lost sheep away from the straight path is actually secondary to the primary, self-interested goal of selling copies of his memoir. Foucault’s

the meaning of the utterance; saying ‘I apologize’ is thus performative, whereas saying, ‘he is running’ is constative ([1962] 1990: 47).

26 failure to discuss the possibility that the speaker could self-consciously construct her identity or comment on the practice of confession itself is a major lacuna in his writing on confession. If we agree with Judith Butler that agency “is to be located within the possibility of a variation on [the] repetition” of social or discursive norms (Butler [1990] 2008: 185), it becomes clear that many confessional writers, aware of the conventions of the genre, manipulate these conventions in order to articulate an agential self. In Elizabeth Smart’s poetic prose novel By Grand Central

Station I Sat Down and Wept, for example, the writer blends information from her own diary with intertextual references in order to produce a work that is simultaneously a personal and archetypal love story. Smart strategically interweaves her confessional discourse with imagery from the Song of Solomon and other canonical texts, I argue in Chapter 3, in order to legitimate, rather than justify, her adulterous affair. Whereas a standard confession would necessarily involve apologizing for her conduct, Smart uses the confessional mode to paint a highly stylized, aestheticized portrait of her romance with the married poet George Barker. It is my contention that Smart gains agency through this praxis by actively opposing her poetic prose to the social discourse of adultery.

Another possible critique of Foucault’s stance on confession is to be found, paradoxically, elsewhere in Foucault’s writing. Judith Butler shares with him the view that the subject is constructed discursively, through the social structures she inhabits, and that these structures are in turn governed by relations of power. As she explains in the following passage, however, power can give structure to the subject without inherently subordinating her. She writes,

We are used to thinking of power as what presses on the subject from the outside, as what subordinates, sets underneath, and relegates to a lower order. But if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then

power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend upon for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are. (1997: 2)

The insight that Butler attributes to Foucault might be extended to the question of confession, where dynamics of power shape the kind of discourse that occurs within the interlocutive context. Whereas Foucault regards the balance of power as lying exclusively with the confessor, it is possible to argue that the confessant need not feel subordinated to a given norm but rather challenged to overcome its limitations. Feminist writers, for instance, have strategically used the form of confessional writing to convey their experience. Women’s choices regarding how to frame their narratives are deliberate and oriented toward their audience: “feminist confession selects out those aspects of experience which are perceived to possess a representative significance in relation to the audience of women it wishes to reach” (Felski, 1989: 95). In this case, the confessant stands in solidarity with her projected interlocutors, namely a community of women, rather than existing in a subordinate relationship to them. In fact, she creates this community through the act of writing itself by defining a problem and implicating her audience within it. This insight is particularly relevant in the case of Les images, which, as will be discussed in the fourth chapter, examines social marginalization through the lens of madness.

Bouchard makes use of confessional discourse to give a voice to her repressed protagonist and by extension to implicate her reader in the process of identity formation. Far from capitulating to an established norm, her text stages its resistance by subverting the expectations of self- disclosure from within.

Confession as a Speech Act

In order to understand how contemporary texts engage with the structures of Catholic confession it is useful to consider confession as a speech act. This concept was developed by J. L. Austin in his groundbreaking study How to Do Things with Words (1962). His goal in this book is to show how we use language not simply to communicate information, but also to perform specific actions in the world. In its first section, Austin sets out to defend a distinction he makes between constative and performative utterances. Whereas constative utterances are “either true or false”

([1962] 1990: 45), performatives cannot be evaluated according to the same criteria because their function “is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it” ([1962] 1990: 6). Instead of judging them true or false, we judge performatives “happy or unhappy” ([1962] 1990: 54).21 The “commonest type” of performative speech operates by way of a verb “in the first person singular present indicative active” ([1962] 1990: 56).22 This fact compels Austin to identify a structural asymmetry: whereas the first person of a given verb has the power to operate as a performative, the third person does not possess this same power. “I confess” is a different kind of utterance than “he confesses,” because the latter statement merely reports a fact. The implications of this asymmetry are critical when analyzing literary works, as it suggests that a first-person narrator holds a performative power absent from third-person narration.

Performative speech appears both in private encounters, when we promise or apologize, for example, as well as in public rituals such as the christening of a ship or the inauguration of a

21 Austin also uses the terms ‘felicitous’ and ‘infelicitous’ to describe the success or failure of a performative. 22 Examples of these verbs include ‘to baptise,’ ‘to christen,’ ‘to marry,’ ‘to promise,’ etc.

29 session of parliament. In all cases, performative language can only function felicitously when it obeys six rules:

(A.1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further, (A.2) the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. (B.1) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and (B.2) completely. (Г.1) Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend to conduct themselves, and further (Г.2) must actually so conduct themselves subsequently. ([1962] 1990: 14-15)23

The idea of performative speech is useful in understanding the interaction that transpires in the confessional booth between priest and penitent: the penitent presents his transgressions according to a specific formula (A.1 in Austin’s classification) —the famous phrase “forgive me

Father, for I have sinned” being the classic, but not mandatory, example— and the priest pronounces a particular response to absolve him (fulfilling A.2). As one critic summarizes,

“Under a kind of speech act theory, it was held that the sacrament itself conferred forgiveness, and not the sinner’s contrition alone. The actual words, ‘Ego te absolvo’ were not declaratory on

23 After devoting seven lectures of How to Do Things With Words to the doctrine of performatives, Austin switches gears in the eighth lecture. He devotes the rest of the book to developing his theory of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary effects. Austin describes the relationship between his two theories thus: “The doctrine of the performative/constative distinction stands to the doctrine of locutionary and illocutionary acts in the total speech-act as the special theory to the general theory” ([1962] 1990: 148). For my purposes, I will refer mainly to Austin’s “special theory” of performative/constative utterances. For a more protracted discussion of the relationship between the two theories see Shoshana Felman’s insightful analysis in Le Scandale du corps parlant (1980, 17-27).

30 the part of the priest but judicial or performative, having operative power in themselves” (Senior,

1994: 35).24 That confession is a speech act is a fact acknowledged even by liturgical authority; the Catholic catechism states that “[p]enance [of which confession is a part] is a liturgical action”

(“Article 4”: 1480)25 which serves as “the only ordinary way for the faithful to reconcile themselves with God and the Church” (4.1484). Of course, there is more to penance than simply rehearsing a verbal formula in the right circumstances, as the catechism details. Catholics hold that God’s grace is at the heart of the absolution a penitent achieves through her contrition and is conferred by God alone. On the speaker’s side, however, the fulfillment of (Г.1) demands a very involved set of “thoughts and feelings” made explicit in the Catholic catechism: she must engage in an “examination of conscience” (4.1435), speak from a place of “animi cruciatus (affliction of spirit)” (4.1431), seek “innermost truth” (4.1469) and desire “forgiveness and reconciliation”

(4.1440). I characterize Catholic confession by these four main tenets, which make a prominent appearance in Augustine’s Confessions, religious liturgy, as well as the catechism, and which will be discussed in more detail below.

Even before delving into their content, it bears pointing out that many of the texts I will consider announce their engagement with the religious tradition in their very title, a fact which confirms Genette’s suggestion that there exists “dans le titre une part [...] d’allusion transtextuelle” (1982, 45).26 The title By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept refers to

24 There is some debate within the Church as to the necessity of pronouncing the proper formula in order to be sure that absolution has been performed felicitously. Interestingly enough, the Catholic Encyclopedia entry for ‘Absolution’ features a protracted discussion of the question, “Is the indicative form necessary?” (see the sub- heading “Form”) (Hanna, 1907). The necessity of the indicative form of the verb, as discussed, is a question Austin himself ponders in his discussion of performatives. 25 From this point onward, I will refer to articles of the catechism by number using the formula (4.[number]) 26 There exists “in the title one part transtextual allusion” [translation mine]. Titles, in Genette’s taxonomy, belong to the order of “paratextual” relations (1982: 9).

Psalm 137, “By the waters of Babylon I sat down and wept”; Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra examines Christian ideas of the sacred and the profane; a “martyrology” is a list of saints; The

Handmaid’s Tale is a reference to the biblical story of Rachel’s handmaid Bilhah; the resonance of Les Images echoes the language of parable, and gestures toward the overt Christian references that are found in the body of the text. It is thus incumbent upon the reader to consider the extent to which the conventions of the restricted form of confession, namely that which takes place in the confessional booth, are taken up within the larger confessional frame of the text. As Genette and others have pointed out, a text makes many statements to the reader outside the body of the narrative that influence how she interprets it. Consider the “architextual” (Genette, 1982: 11) appendage of the term ‘memoir’ to A Million Little Pieces: had Frey marketed his book as a novel rather than a memoir, there never would have been such a storm of controversy surrounding his violation of “the autobiographical pact” (as Philippe Lejeune terms it) (1975:

12). Another example is Rousseau’s choice of a title eponymous to that of Augustine, the use of which consciously places his secular memoir in dialogue with the most important religious autobiography written to that date.

While the confessional texts I am discussing borrow much from religious practice, it is important to acknowledge that, as literary texts, they cannot be evaluated according to the same criteria as religious confessions. Certain important structural differences subtend the literary confession, such as the presence of a reader, rather than a priest, as interlocutor. The purpose of the present discussion is not to show how literary confessions differ from the confessions one makes in a church, as to do so would be to compare two things that are entirely different in kind.

Rather, it is to demonstrate that, whereas Augustine’s Confessions observes the four postulates of

Catholic confession, the works of the writers I discuss in the chapters that follow critique these postulates by undermining their authority. By problematizing the idea of subjectivity as an

‘inward journey’, moving beyond the rhetoric of culpability, deconstructing the possibility of transcendental truth and imagining their escape from their respective communities, the Canadian and Québécois writers in my corpus deploy confession as a form of agential discourse. My contention is that they operate by way of parody, in the sense Genette and Hutcheon define this concept as “repetition with distance” (Hutcheon, 1985: 32). Rather than reject confessional discourse as a possible mode of self-expression, these writers make use of its power as a speech act; at the same time, however, they deliberately challenge and subvert the tenets of Catholic dogma that normally underwrite the practice.

For Gérard Genette and Linda Hutcheon, parody constitutes a non-satirical means of engaging with an existing text (Genette, 1982: 36). Hutcheon writes,

There is nothing in parodia that necessitates the inclusion of a concept of ridicule, as there is, for instance, in the joke or burla of burlesque. Parody, then, in its ironic ‘trans-contextualization’ and inversion, is repetition with difference. A critical distance is implied between the background text being parodied and the new incorporating work, a distance usually signalled by irony. But this irony can be playful as well as belittling; it can be critically constructive as well as destructive. (1985: 32)

Both Hutcheon and Genette distinguish parody from satire,27 a concept with which it is often confused, as lacking the element of ridicule that characterizes the latter. Parody operates through the varied repetition “of another discursive text”; its target is thus “intramural,” unlike that of satire, which is “extramural (social, moral)” (Hutcheon, 1985: 43).

Parody becomes an agential practice when the structures employed by a given text can be redeployed with the distance required to bring them under critical scrutiny. In claiming that the

27 For Hutcheon, “the satiric ethos” “always implies corrective intent” (1985: 61). Hutcheon also characterizes satire as “scornful” (1985: 61) and “deflating” (1985: 62).

33 texts under consideration take a parodic approach to confession, then, I am not suggesting that their intent is to ridicule the practice. Although sometimes the texts are deeply critical of the institution of the Church, as is the case, for example, in Michel Tremblay’s work, they nevertheless take very seriously the extent to which confessional practices have permeated our culture. They also take seriously the possibility for confessional discourse to be repurposed as an agential form of self-determination. Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra takes direct aim at the effects of the Church’s conservative clutch on society, but it makes use of the confessional mode in order to do so. By making use of parody rather than satire, their critiques effectively turn the dogma of institutional authority against itself instead of railing against it from without.

A synthesis of Austin’s concept of performative speech and Hutcheon’s concept of parody can be found in Judith Butler’s writings on the performance of gender. In Gender

Trouble, Butler argues that gender, a quality that is held to be inherent in human subjects, is actually “an effect of discursive practices” ([1990] 2008: 24). Gender identity is not a biological destiny, but rather the product, as well as the ongoing implementation, of normative discourse.

Austin’s doctrine of performative speech provides the theoretical foundations for Butler’s thesis in its suggestion that we use language not just to describe reality but also to create it. By de- essentializing gender, Butler is likewise able to envision a praxis of resistance in “the possibility of a repetition of the law which is not its consolidation, but its displacement” (Butler [1990]

2008: 42); agency is to be located precisely in the process of “variation on that repetition”

([1990] 2008:145). The example Butler gives of such an agential practice is drag, in which the performer self-consciously embodies and manipulates gender conventions ([1990] 2008: 186-

187). It is no coincidence that Butler’s language recalls Hutcheon’s definition of parody as

“repetition with difference,” for both are making similar points in different contexts. For

Hutcheon, parody, unlike satire, takes its target very seriously. Far from attempting to critique or

34 dismantle this target, a parody is successful insofar as its recipient is able to recognize the

‘hypotext’ in the ‘hypertext’.28 Likewise, as a system of “signification,” gender functions “within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat” (Butler [1990] 2008: 185). A drag queen does not dismantle the categories of gender per se, but draws attention to a structural binary through, to use Hutcheon’s particularly fitting phrase, “ironic ‘trans-contextualization’.” The irony created when a man dresses as a woman is not the kind of antiphrastic saying-of-the-opposite-of-what- one-means Hutcheon rejects in Irony’s Edge. It is in keeping with Hutcheon’s definition of irony as the “semantically complex process of relating, differentiating, and combining said and unsaid meanings - and doing so with an evaluative edge” (1995: 89). For a man to dress as a woman is not simply a reversal of the gender roles, but rather, as Butler makes plain, an “evaluative” commentary on the normalizing discourse of gender itself.

To put it in Austin’s terms, gender parody involves creating ironic distance by deliberately making infelicitous speech acts. The male drag queen’s statement “I am a woman” is either a “misfire” or an “abuse,” depending on precisely which postulate we regard him as having violated: if ‘woman’ is an essential, biological category, then the drag queen is not in the position to make such a statement (thus violating postulate [A.2]). If, however, ‘woman’ is a gender category to which a person of either sex can conform, then the drag queen’s statement is what Austin would term an “abuse,” the category he reserves for “those infelicities where the act is achieved” (16). The drag queen successfully dubs herself a woman, but because her very performance is predicated on her performing as a woman, the self-identification is undermined by the performer’s awareness of the contingency of gender categorization.

28 These terms are borrowed from Genette (1982: 11).

Part of the difficulty in determining the precise nature of the speech act “I am a woman,” or, rather, its failure, is bound up with the slippage Austin himself identifies between constative and performative utterances. As Sara Salih points out,

It is difficult for Austin to maintain the somewhat blurred distinction between performative and constative utterances, and this is an instability that Butler, following Derrida, exploits. ‘It’s a girl!’ is not a constative utterance but a performative one in which the girl, rather than being described in ‘neutral’ terms, is interpellated as and thereby ‘becomes’ a sexed and gendered subject. (2004, 140)

This same slippage characterizes the act of confession, which oscillates between the constative and performative registers. A confessant has to speak in the constative mode in order to describe the sins that she has committed; by speaking in the right way, at the proper time, in the proper place, to the proper person, however, her discourse takes on the performative power to begin to exonerate her from the very deeds she describes.

Foucault, it must be stated, is aware of the performative power of confession, which he defines as “un rituel de discours où le sujet qui parle coïncide avec le sujet de l’énoncé”29 (1976:

82). For him, however, the confessant makes use of this performative power in order to avow his complicity with dominant social norms; by saying what he has done wrong, he thereby commits himself to upholding the very values he has transgressed. There is nothing subversive about performativity in and of itself. Butler argues that the same is true of parody, suggesting that

“there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively

29 “a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement” (Foucault, [1978] 1990: 61).

36 disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony” ([1990] 2008: 189).

The writers in my corpus exploit the entanglement of constative and performative speech in order to show how confession can serve to actively build the subject’s identity. In deconstructing the term “confession” as the substance of his confession, for example, bpNichol parodies the practice of disclosing the self by means of a prescribed formula. Instead of looking inward and arriving at a definitive self-understanding, he looks outward, to language, to interrogate the human structures out of which meaning is made. He deconstructs the very term

“confession” within the larger confessional framework of The Martyrology. Breaking the word up into its component parts, “confess i on,” he wonders, “‘why con then?’/ prisoners of our frameworks really/ our mental sets/ backdrops for the larger drama of/our ‘lives’” (Nichol,

1982). The real ‘con’, he suggests, are the conventional structures that chain individuals to restricted ways of seeing the world. Nichol, throughout the multi-volume Martyrology, consistently draws attention to his self-conscious use of confessional discourse. He does so in order to challenge the traditional implications of this rhetorical mode and to offer his radical poetics as a praxis or resistance. Nichol demonstrates one way in which a writer can parody the practice of confession to make a broader commentary on normative social structures: for him and other writers, parody involves moving ludically between constative and performative statements about the confessing self.

In order to argue that the writers in my corpus parody the principles on which confession is founded, it is necessary to explain their precise nature. The section that follows will expand my discussion of what I have referred to as ‘the four tenets’ of Catholic confession.

First Tenet: The Interior Conversion and the Myth of the Unified Subject

Jesus’s call to conversion and penance, like that of the prophets before him, does not aim first at outward works, “sackcloth and ashes,” fasting and mortification, but at the conversion of the heart, interior conversion. Without this, such penances remain sterile and false; however, interior conversion urges expression in visible signs, gestures and works of penance. (4.1430)

The 1430th article of the Roman Catholic catechism stipulates that a confessant need experience an “interior conversion” in order to make a successful confession. This inward state, it is suggested, subsequently becomes manifested in “visible signs, gestures and works of penance.”

Augustine experiences just such a moment of conversion in the famous tolle lege scene of The

Confessions, when a supernatural voice instructs him to “take up and read” the Bible at his side.

Augustine opens to a passage from Romans (VIII.13): “Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts.” This is precisely the instruction Augustine requires to turn away from his sinful ways; he writes, “I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart.

All the shadows of doubt were dispelled” (VIII.xii.29). The Confessions chronicles Augustine’s search for true faith, the result of which is his ultimate conversion to Catholicism. Although

Augustine’s voyage takes him down many different literal and spiritual paths, he remains guided throughout his journey by an inward sense of the need to find God. This inward journey is central to The Confessions. Charles Taylor goes as far as to characterize Augustine as a proto-

Cartesian figure, grounding his faith in the empirical world on a radically interior perspective. He argues that “Augustine was the inventor of the argument we know as the ‘cogito’ because

Augustine was the first to make the first-person standpoint fundamental to our search for the truth” (Taylor, 1992: 133).

As “originator of that strand of Western spirituality which has sought the certainty of God within” (Taylor, 1992: 140), Augustine can be regarded as the champion of what is now regarded in certain circles as the “notorious unified subject,” an “authentic, self-consistent, essential subject, a ‘true self’” (Pratt, 1986: 62).30 Linda Anderson characterizes The Confessions as an instance of “the unified subject of modern liberal ideology successfully allegorizing their own history” (2001: 20). Though Augustine’s path to illumination is circuitous, compelling him to dally with fleshly temptations and deviant religious sects before finding his true faith, the model of subjectivity he develops involves a sense of interiority wholly informed by God’s divine presence. The truth revealed by God becomes the ultimate grounds for the subject’s identity. It is this same model of interiority that the catechism describes in its suggestion of inward conversion.31

The turn inward is consistent with the contemporaneous movement inward taking place within philosophy. Thirteen centuries after Augustine, René Descartes (1596-1650) entrenched the Augustinian turn inward as an ontological and epistemological necessity. His statement, “je pense, donc je suis” made thinking the ontological grounds for the subject ([1637] 2007: IV).

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) agreed with Descartes on the importance of the cogito, entrenching the idea of the transcendental subject. For Kant, the highest freedom a person could achieve

30 Although Pratt is not specifically referring to Augustine, his comments effectively describe the Augustinian subject. 31 Today, the radical interiority required of the confessant is echoed in the privacy in which her penance is enshrouded. However, confession was in its original form a very public event in which the penitent performed her own shaming in front of the community. Chloë Taylor chronicles how the practice evolved from a public display to a dialogue conducted at the feet of one’s priest and then eventually, in the sixteenth century, to its present incarnation as an anonymous disclosure shielded by a screen between confessant and confessor (2009: 55).

39 resulted from following what he termed the “categorical imperative,” a maxim that one must act as if the outcome of one’s actions could be made into a universal law ([1785] 1993: 30). The subject is required to exercise his rational faculties in order to determine which principles to follow. For these Enlightenment thinkers, the subject was posited as the aprioretic grounds of empirical experience in the world: in their view, the individual was a logical being governed by rationality whose motivations could be known to himself. Kant’s categorical imperative is a perfect articulation of the Enlightenment faith in the rational subject: the two main pillars of

Enlightenment selfhood were that the individual, first, is the grounds of knowledge and experience, and, second, uses his rationality to make sense of the world (Mansfield, 2000: 15).

Rousseau’s Confessions perfectly demonstrates the Enlightenment confidence in the ability of the individual to order his reality through his critical faculties. Nick Mansfield argues that “this sense of the sufficiency of individuality is the key to Rousseau’s Confessions” (2000: 16-17).

Rousseau’s ability to speak on his own behalf comes from within himself rather than through either God’s grace or an appeal to external authority.

Faith in this fundamental rationality was however shaken in the twentieth century with the rise of psychoanalysis. The exploration of the unconscious undertaken by Freud and his followers revealed that unpredictable and irrational forces played as much, if not more, of a role in governing an individual’s existence in the world. In the analyst’s office, a confession is not only the narrative a person articulates consciously; it is also the hidden content the analyst infers from the analysand’s statements as well as her unconscious gestures. The analyst plays the role of detective, working to cure his patient by foiling her attempts at self-concealment: Freud writes, “no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore” (1953: 77-78). He holds this to be true whether or not the repression is deliberate: “in neurosis the ego suppresses part of the id out of allegiance to reality,

40 whereas in psychosis it lets itself be carried away by the id and detached from a part of reality”

(1974: 202). Freud’s recognition of the unconscious ushered in a critique of the Enlightenment subject that intensified throughout the twentieth century, to the point where many critics argue that the view of the subject as rational and autonomous “has largely become questionable and suspect today” (Guzzoni, 1996: 205).

Many schools of criticism, working in Freud’s wake, have sought to dismantle the authority of the subject as a “coherent, self-sufficient […] source of meaning or action”

(Hutcheon, 2002: 104). Hutcheon argues alongside Jean-François Lyotard that the loss of faith in structuring metanarratives untethered the subject from possible frames of reference (Lyotard,

1979: xxiii). Whereas the Enlightenment had replaced God with reason, the events of the twentieth century, including two World Wars, undermined the myth of rationality. In the absence of external criteria guaranteed by institutional authority, the subject became an unstable concept.

Foucault’s writings on subjectivity emerge out of this theoretical climate: in his view, subjectivity is formed by relations of power that the individual internalizes (1995: 204).

Following his philosophical trajectory, Judith Butler likewise defines the subject not as a preexisting essence, which is the religious view, but rather as “a consequence of certain rule- governed discourses that govern the intelligible invocation of identity” (Butler [1990] 2008:185).

For her, the subject fashions herself dynamically in response to the discourses that surround her.

These discourses are not merely ancillary to the subject but actually shape the way she exists in her world, where, as previously discussed, “all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat” (Butler [1990] 2008: 185). The subject gains agency when she becomes aware of a given norm and actively modifies it in order to expose its contingency.

Any contemporary discussion of confession must take into account the charges that have been levelled against the notion of a stable, inward-looking, Augustinian subject. The

41 assumption within institutional and informal contexts is that the person who confesses is the subject of her discourse, in both senses of the term, simultaneously occupying the dynamic role of speaker (which David Terry labels the ‘performative’ subject) as well as the passive position of spoken-about (the ‘constative’ subject, in Terry’s terms) (Terry, 2006: 210). The purpose of a legal confession is to establish an identity between the speaker and the perpetrator of a crime: when a person admits to an infidelity, his partner imagines the person standing before her in the arms of another. At the most basic, referential level, the speech act of confession is predicated on an identity between the speaker and the subject of her discourse: in Terry’s terms, the identity of the performative “I” and the constative referent she describes. However, when one begins to question the role confessional discourse plays in the subject’s self-articulation, it becomes clear that confession opens a gap between the subject who performs the confession and the subject she describes in her discourse. This gap is especially apparent when the confession involves self- censure, as its purpose as a speech act is to recuperate the present subject from past transgression and thus overcome it.

The double subject is not particular to the confessional genre per se, as it is also apparent in other self-reflexive modes of literary and non-literary writing, including, as David Terry notes,

“autobiography, testimony, witnessing, and, yes, even the standard scholarly monograph” (2006:

210). However, what distinguishes the confessional speaker from that of another genre is the degree of alienation between the two subject positions, which Terry characterizes as “a strong split between the self-doing-the-talking (performative self) and the self-being-talked-about

(constative self)” (Terry, 2006: 210). For Terry, the past “constative” self is condemned by the present “performative” self; “the constative self is to some degree damned for its sins and the performative self receives some salvation for its willingness to confess those same sins” (2006:

210). The power dynamics that inhere in the gap between these two positions are as influential as

42 those that structure the relationship between confessant and confessor. Before the presence of any real interlocutor, the confessant acts as her own judge, expressing her awareness of her transgression. Although the confessing subject, by admitting her actions, in one sense acknowledges a continuity with her past self, she also distances herself from it. There is a temporal difference between the two subjects; the present self must have the purview to consider the actions of the past self, whether to pass judgment on them or simply to describe them in the light of a present understanding. The subject who speaks is not exactly coincident with the subject who is spoken-about, as the very purpose of admitting one’s actions is paradoxically to distance oneself from them by accepting responsibility.

Whereas Terry regards the split self as corresponding to the confessional subject’s deliberate effort to demarcate her past transgression from her present penitential status, Rita

Felski points out that the split can also occur as an unintended byproduct of the attempt to capture the self in writing. She names this problem “the dialectic of intimacy and alienation” whereby writing generates ever more writing as the very act of using written language defers and deforms the subject it purports to represent (1989: 108). The writer becomes compelled to qualify her statements infinitely, dynamically redescribing herself in order to transcend the fixity of writing, what Derrida calls the “rigidité cadavérique du signe écrit” (1972: 130).32 As

Atwood’s narrator Offred observes, “It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts” (168-169). Thus, rather than establish the identity of the self, writes Felski, “the act of confession can potentially exacerbate rather than alleviate problems of self-identity, engendering a dialectic in which the production of ever more writing as a means to defining a

32 “cadaverous rigidity of the written sign” (Derrida, 1981: 114).

43 center of meaning merely serves to underscore the alienation of the subject even as it seeks to overcome it” (1989: 104). Terry and Felski identify two very different reasons for the fractured self: in the former case, the split is a conscious demarcation of performative and constative selves, whereas in the latter the split is simply the inherent limitation of writing as a static medium.

Although the idea of a split subject proposed by Terry and Felski appears to threaten the concept of a unified subject, closer inspection reveals that the two concepts are not mutually exclusive. One can in fact go so far as to say that the Augustinian inward conversion is predicated on the idea of a split rather than a unified self, as the moment of conversion necessarily ushers in a new form of the subject. The conversion that occurs through God’s grace involves the complete reorientation of his being: when Augustine leaves off his wanton ways, he abandons this past identity entirely, describing it as deviated from the true path. Therefore, although it is the case that there is a split between the past and present subject, it must be noted that the view of the subject is in this instance ultimately a unified one, whose identity is grounded in the truth of God and which Augustine finds by turning inward. Augustine does not place the emphasis on the discursive power of confession as a speech act, because ultimately, as his quasi-mystical conversion demonstrates, one has to surrender oneself to God’s grace, which transcends the utterance itself. Annemarie Kidder points out that the Hebrew and Greek words for repentance denote, respectively, “to turn” and to “change one’s mind”; thus, she writes,

“When we repent we ‘turn’ and ‘change our mind’ about who we thought we were and the acceptability of what we have done. We recognize the difference between our ways and the ways

God intended for us and find that we have drifted off course and out of line with the divine current” (2010: 3). Her nautical imagery suggests that there is only one true course, and that it is the subject’s duty at all times to align her moral compass with the correct path. The Christian

44 view Kidder propounds is not shared by those who regard the subject as a discursive construct:

David Terry warns that it is important “to be skeptical of any confessional speech act that claims that the subjectivity of the self-doing-the-talking (performative self) has transcended the historicity of the self-being-talked-about (constative self)” (2006: 211). Terry cautions against giving more ontological weight to the performing subject than the constative past self whom she disavows.

A certain degree of splitting of the subject is present in all instances of confession, but does not in itself destabilize the concept of a fundamentally unified subject. The distinction between the Augustinian, unified subject and the discursive subject theorized by Foucault, Butler and others is to be located in the role attributed to discourse itself. Whereas for Augustine language and discourse are ancillary to the revealed truth of God, for the latter critics discourse is actually constitutive of the subject. If Augustine can be said to turn inward toward revealed truth,

Foucault et al. can be regarded as looking outward, to the determining power of social norms.

The difference of these paradigms becomes clear when one considers the role the performance of confession plays either in stabilizing or destabilizing the subject. Against the linear, teleological structure of Augustine’s inward journey, Louise Bouchard, in her epistolary narrative Les

Images, presents a model of subjectivity that borrows simultaneously from several competing sets of imagery. The protagonist consistently redescribes herself through various biblical intertexts, troubling the linear, causal logic of confession through the protagonist’s fluctuating identity. As she reflects on her struggle with depression and madness, she alters the governing metaphor through which she regards herself: at times she is Isaac, son of Abraham, and when she is feeling disempowered she becomes the unnamed daughter of Jephte. To a certain extent, the fluctuating identifications correspond to the narrator’s mental instability; at the same time, it is important to note that these characters are deliberate avatars chosen by the narrator to better

45 understand herself. She simultaneously looks inward, describing her tortured emotional state, and outward, to the world of literature and the Bible. In doing so, Bouchard demonstrates how identity is a construct that occurs in and through discourse, rather than a pre-given essence. It is particularly significant that she uses Biblical figures to do so, as it is precisely the Christian myth of God as a transcendental signified at which she takes aim.

One of the challenges for writers engaging creatively with confession is how to represent a dynamic self in the awareness that there is no final vocabulary in which the self can ultimately be fixed. Lejeune, wondering “[q]uand la Berma joue Phèdre, qui dit ‘Je’ ?” suggests that “ce n’est pas la personne qui définit le ‘je’, mais peut-être le ‘je,’ la personne” (1975 : 20).33

Lejeune credits the French linguist Émile Benveniste with the insight that the autonomy of the first person‘I’ is guaranteed not by anything in the empirical world but rather through the power of discourse to demarcate this ‘I’ from other objects. The writers in my corpus, aware of the discursive nature of the subject, work to understand what role confessional speech plays in dialogically creating the self. While Christian doctrine maintains that the subject precedes her confession, we might counter that in these works the act of confessing precedes the creation of the subject. One of the features that they share is an awareness of the way the subject is formed through the discourses that surround her; they thus bear out Peter Brooks’s point, which echoes

Benveniste, that “the expression of subjectivity takes place in the context of intersubjectivity”

(Brooks, 2000: 95). Offred takes this point to its logical extremity in The Handmaid’s Tale when she writes in full awareness of her need to conform: “[m]y self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born” (Atwood: 82).

33 Lejeune, wondering “[w]hen Berma plays Phèdre, who is saying ‘I’?”, suggests that “it is not the individual who defines the ‘I’, but perhaps the ‘I’, the individual.” Lejeune continues, “that is to say, the individual exists only in discourse” (1989: 9).

Tremblay’s character Sandra likewise speaks of “[l]es cent autres visages de femmes que j’ai composés, que j’ai créés moi-même,” stating that they “me ressemblent plus que ce qui reste de moi en-dessous” (54).34 The notion of the unified, inward-looking subject is the first tenet of confession that the writers under consideration reject. As Paul Smith has argued, the stakes of this rejection are high :

If power/knowledge works at the level of the subject, then it is at the level of the subject that it will most effectively be resisted. Since there is no authentic or natural self that we can simply recover or struggle to liberate, subjects should be geared toward a dynamic self-creation, an experimental expansion of the possibilities of subjectivity in open defiance of the modes of being that are being laid down for us constantly in every moment of our day-to-day lives. (1988 : 63)

Whereas Foucault rejects confession as a means of undertaking this “dynamic self-creation,” it is clear that many writers conversely regard it as a powerful rhetorical mode.

Second Tenet: The Confessant Feels Guilt or Shame and Desires Punishment

Among the penitent’s acts contrition occupies first place. Contrition is “sorrow of the soul and detestation for the sin committed, together with the resolution not to sin again.” (4.1451)

Guilt and shame are two feelings that are often cited as motivators for acts of confession as well as the desire for absolution. According to Dennis Foster, they are the modality of the confessant, who “speaks in guilt” (1987: 2). Paul de Man confirms that “[t]o confess is to overcome guilt and shame” (1979: 279). The Catholic catechism and the many attendant exegeses stipulate that one

34 “[t]he hundred other faces of women that I’ve drawn, that I’ve created myself, look more like me than what’s left of me underneath” (31).

47 of the purposes of confession is to remove feelings of guilt. Foucault characterizes the awareness of transgression as every Christian’s “duty,” arguing that he must not only be aware of his transgressions but moreover must “tell these things to other people, and hence, to bear witness against himself” (2007: 171). According to Dennis Foster, this compulsion to rehearse one’s guilt to an interlocutor “informs the workings of many kinds of narrative”; confessional narratives “are narrated by characters consumed with guilt and driven to talk about it” (Foster,

1987: 18). They thus serve the normative function of allowing the speaker to recognize his deviation from the expectations of his community and to begin to make restitution.

Roger Shuy agrees with Foucault that confession is a normative practice, drawing on

Austin to argue that

the [confessant] believes that what he or she did was wrong according to a recognized set of norms, [...] the confessor believes that the person to whom he or she is confessing also shares those norms, or that the person to whom the confession is given is in a position of authority over the confessor and that the confessor is aware that his or her confession correlates with some type of punishment. (1998 : 4)

Shuy states that confession can be characterized as a “commissive” speech act, which commits the speaker to a given course of action (1998: 4). Commissives are the third of Austin’s five

“classes of utterance”; they “commit you to doing something, but include also declarations or announcements of intention” (Austin, [1962] 1990: 152). Shuy’s decision to regard confession as a commitment rather than just as a form of testimony or apology35 shows the extent to which he regards it as a transaction that takes place between interlocutors, the end result of which is some

35 Apologies belong to the fourth class of “behabitives” which “have to do with attitudes and social behaviour. Examples are apologizing, congratulating, commending, condoling, cursing and challenging” (Austin, [1962] 1990: 152).

48 kind of reaction on the part of the recipient.36 In order for a confession to another person not to be infelicitous, Shuy maintains, one has to state something that one does not believe the listener already knows (1998 : 4). A confessant, however, does not simply state this secret to the person she has wronged, nor does she merely offer an apology; crucially, she engages in a practice of self-censure that implies her willingness to be readmitted into a given community through a kind of penance. Because “guilt and expiation are a desired end,” Shuy argues, “one does not confess to getting straight As on a report card or to being promoted to vice president, except perhaps facetiously” (1998: 4). According to him, one can only confess something negative that will result in feelings of guilt or shame. Peter Brooks views this cycle of guilt as “its own kind of performance, producing at the same time the excuse of guilt (by the fact of confessing it) and the accumulation of more guilt (by the act of confessing it) in a dynamic that is potentially infinite”

(Brooks, 1996: 124). Guilt is both the motivator and the end product of confession: one confesses because one feels guilty, and at the same time produces guilt through the act of confessing a wrongdoing. Although the overt purpose of confession is to rid oneself of one’s guilt by atoning for one’s sins and thus to be readmitted into the community, one of the by- products of confession is the amplification of guilt. The production of guilt could thus be regarded as a “perlocutionary” effect of confession, which Austin defines as a by-product of the act of expression ([1962] 1990:109). This guilt permeates beyond the walls of the confessional booth, penetrating into the very being of the subject in the form of internalized norms.

36 Viewed in another light, it would be possible to classify confession within Austin’s fifth category of “expositives” which “involve assuming an obligation”; Austin’s examples are ‘testify’, ‘report’, ‘swear’, and ‘conjecture’ (Austin, [1962] 1990: 162).

While for many critics the presence of guilty feelings is one of the hallmarks of the confessional genre, others have argued that it “need not be present for discourse to slip into confession” (Terry, 2006: 210). Moreover,

The content of a confession need not even be sinful per se. Anything that is taboo in a given context, because it is considered too petty, too private, too idiosyncratic, too profane, too emotional, or just too mundane, can be sufficient to produce the sense of discursive self-overcoming that is the hallmark of a confessional speech act as I am using the term. (Terry, 2006: 210)

Chloë Taylor agrees that confessions need not be steeped in guilt, but are rather “statements which claim to explain the being of the subject who is speaking, which are introspective, which utterances change her […] and which are told despite claims of repression” (2009: 8). Bernard

Krondorfer likewise moves beyond the discourse of guilt and shame, and, more radically, maintains that a confession need not even occur in response to a taboo. For him, confessants

“feel an urge to share with us their intimate selves, […] have sinned, […] have experienced a transformative moment, […] want to be forgiven, or […] are self-absorbed and self-interested”

(Krondorfer, 2010: 2).

Chloë Taylor identifies the antidote to domination of the type Foucault diagnoses as lying in the performative rather than the constative truth of the utterance. When the subject is speaking about herself, the propositional content of her statements might be empirically untrue; nevertheless, the very act of confessing demonstrates and generates certain ‘truths’ that are no less alienable from her identity. Although he writes extensively on technologies of the self,

Foucault never acknowledges that confessions could be instrumentalized and used, performatively, as a tool of self-fashioning; he remains limited to regarding confession as abiding in the domain of truth.

Krondorfer, Taylor, and other critics are right to extend the boundary of confession to encompass more than just narratives of guilt or shame. bpNichol’s The Martyrology is an example of a text that uses confession in the service of a existential, philosophical and aesthetic project. Getting beyond the restrictive conventions of language is one of the long poem’s central preoccupations, which Nichol tackles directly in Book 2. His persona confesses to St Rand, “oh i do listen saint rand/ but the vision/ those bodies wrapped in chains/ as language as the chain they did not see” (1972). The structure and imagery of this passage evoke a person suffering from post-traumatic stress confiding in a mental health worker. The topic here, however, is the confining nature of conventional language and the speaker’s desire to be free of it. The persona speaks in the confessional mode because its intimacy allows him to articulate a deep personal engagement with questions of normative language. He avoids the rhetoric of guilt and shame, instead framing his project of self-exploration as a kind of dynamic self-creation both in language and in the world; at the same time, Nichol always leaves room for the unknown. In

Book 3, he confesses, “i don’t know what to say/father i confess ignorance of what the next phrase is” (1976). Rather than censure himself for this moment of stasis in the artistic process, the poet incorporates the uncertainty into his praxis such that it becomes a component of his ongoing process of self-definition. In contrast to the tolle lege scene, where the answer

Augustine seeks is divinely revealed within the pages of the Bible, Nichol infuses uncertainty into his confession. The “father” he addresses, as a projection of his own imagination, is incapable of providing any kind of definitive answer. His confession is parodic insofar as it replaces the expected avowal of wrongdoing with a self-reflexive statement on the process of artistic composition. The feelings of guilt traditionally associated with Catholic confession are one of the most important targets for writers working against its conventions. Nichol thus

51 provides an excellent example of a confessional practice that rejects the discourse of guilt and shame in favour of a more progressive, agential self-articulation.

Third Tenet: The Confessant’s Duty Is to Tell the Truth

O Holy Ghost, Spirit of Love and Dispenser of all graces, help me to receive this great Sacrament worthily, give me Your grace that I may make a careful examination of conscience and discover my sins. Touch my heart that I may hate and detest them, and assist me to make a firm resolution to avoid sin henceforth. Spirit of Love and Truth, assist me to make a sincere, entire, and truthful Confession to Your representative, the priest, and thus obtain Your forgiveness, Your grace, and Your love (“Prayer Before Confession”)

And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. (St. John 3:32)

In order for a Catholic confession to be felicitous it has to be “true”: the penitent has to speak with sincerity to a priest, condemning her past actions and genuinely desiring to be readmitted into the community of the faithful. The concept of truth is thus present in the assumption that the content of what she says is a genuine account of what happened, in the sincerity with which she confesses it, and in the immutability of God’s prescriptions for a Christian life. Augustine apostrophizes God throughout his Confessions, calling him “truth itself” (X.xxiii.34). The notion of truth is at the heart of confession.

Foucault, as previously discussed, is critical of confessional discourse on the grounds that it creates the truth it purports to uncover (1976: 79-81). Peter Brooks echoes this view in his assertion that “Western culture [...] has made confessional speech a prime mark of authenticity, par excellence the kind of speech in which the individual authenticates his inner truth” (Brooks,

2000: 4). Confessional discourse, beyond simply functioning as a vehicle for conveying information, actually has the performative power to guarantee the authenticity of the subject’s

52 statement. Confessional writing, according to this criterion, would be a kind of writing by which the subject gives an account of her inner truth. This is precisely the definition offered by the novelist J. M. Coetzee, who argues that “we can demarcate a mode of autobiographical writing that we call the confession, as distinct from the memoir and the apology, on the basis of an underlying motive to tell an essential truth about the self” (1985: 194). Coetzee characterizes confessional literature as displaying a greater degree of sincerity than those forms of autobiographical writing that present a deliberate, stylized narrative regarding the subject.

Krondorfer likewise distinguishes confessional writing or “confessiography” from autobiography on similar grounds, stating that “[c]onfessiographic writings are characterized by a certain intensity and sincerity in the search for authenticity without shying away from exposing layers of intimacy to the public” (2010: 10).

In the case of fictional works, of course, the question of truth does not operate according to the criteria of Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’, which states that an autobiography is characterized by the onomastic identity of the author, narrator, and protagonist. The fact that a reader knows a given confession does not correspond directly to the author of the novel does not however cancel the pact that exists between the character making the confession and the expectations that attach to such a speech act. In a fictional situation, a given confession will by definition be constatively false relative to the real world of the author, but can either be constatively true or false within the world of the text. In the works I will examine, the impetus to remain faithful to a constative referent is less important than the performance of the narrative act itself. As Michel Tremblay’s cross-dressing character Sandra puts it, “Pourquoi te demander pourquoi, c’est niaiseux. Surtout quand t’as le cul pour t’empêcher d’y penser” (28).37 Although

37 “Why ask yourself why, it’s stupid. Especially when you can fuck, so you don’t have to think” (8).

Sandra purports to privilege sexual licentiousness over existential rumination, it is clear that she is nonetheless very self-reflective, interested in interrogating social morays and her relationship to them. The reader (or viewer) is forced to read between the lines; by doing so, she realizes that

Sandra’s performance of her hyper-sexualized identity is as much a part of her ‘confession’ as are the words she utters. A performer by nature, Sandra’s speech is as deceptive as her cross- dressing exterior. And though she posits the way of the flesh as the guiding principle of her life, her ultimate desire to achieve transcendence at the play’s end suggests that she is compelled by more metaphysical forces.

Even in works that do purport to accept the terms of the autobiographical pact, Coetzee’s privileging of “the motive to tell an essential truth about the self” is a problematic criterion for confessional literature. As Paul de Man reminds us, “a literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode” (1979: 17). In his famous deconstruction of a passage from Rousseau’s Confessions, he shows that even the most seemingly self- condemnatory writing is motivated by desires that may not even be fully transparent to the writer. De Man performs a close reading of a passage where Rousseau describes an episode from his past in which he stole a ribbon. The young Jean-Jacques subsequently blamed the theft on the object of his affections, in his mind the ribbon’s intended destinatee, a hapless servant girl who was fired as a result (de Man, 1979: 280). In spite of Rousseau’s stated desire to lay bare his crime in order to incur deserved guilt and shame, de Man argues that Rousseau actually performs an elaborate justification of his crime. From the French saying “Qui s’accuse s’excuse” (1979:

280), ‘he who accuses himself apologizes,’ de Man coaxes out an insidious alternate rendering:

‘he who accuses himself excuses himself.’ He sees the desire to exonerate the self as so powerful that “it ruins the seriousness of any confessional discourse by making it self-destructive” (1979:

280). Roger Shuy likewise argues that self-aggrandizing is one of the inherent modalities of confessional discourse (1998: 6).

It is thus impossible to agree with Coetzee or Krondorfer’s privileging of truth and sincerity, for even if one had special insight into an author’s motives, it is less than certain that this writer herself would have such insight into her own mind. Moreover, even if the writer were particularly attuned to her unconscious impulses, the reader could still not be certain that she was electing to tell the truth. And even if she were sincerely attempting to do so, deconstructionists have convincingly dismantled both the notion that truth exists as well as the idea that language can faithfully capture its object. For Richard Rorty, all supposed truths are contingent and functions of the discourse in which they are articulated: “To say that truth is not out there,” he writes, “is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations” (Rorty, 1989: 5).

The absence of a transcendental signified in The Martyrology illustrates Rorty’s point; as Roy

Miki has argued about this text, “[w]ith a trust in language, significance need no longer be located in a point of reference outside the text—say the authority of ‘father’ who sits on high handing down meaning—but is subsumed by the signifying process itself” (1988: 26). Fittingly, the saints that populate it are constructed out of broken words: St Rand, St Rain, St Orm, and their ilk, are wholly products of language, such that the authority of language as a transparent system of communication is undermined. Nichol refers to this rejection of absolute meaning as

“glimpses of another truth” (1982). However, his project is not to discover absolute truth outside of the conventional avenues such as religion; instead, his performative fracturing of language casts doubt on the social apparatus through which truth is established.

Another significant rejection of the discourse of truth occurs in Chaurette’s play

Provincetown Playhouse, which Pascal Riendeau has argued is characterized by a “refus de

55 proposer une vision du monde unique ou encore d’envisager le monde comme un système cohérent (comme un Tout)”38 (Riendeau, 1997: 70). This refusal of coherence is expressed in the multiple competing narratives that subvert the univocity of the play and in fact render it, in the words of one critic, “[i]njouable, irreprésentable, totale” (Chagnon, 1981: 9).39 The stakes of this extreme dramatic infelicity are in fact very high: the false conviction and execution that results from an overzealous desire for coherence ultimately embodies the danger of capitulating to easy narratives. It is important to note that while Provincetown Playhouse is the one text in my corpus that does not engage overtly with Christianity, the influence of the Christian idea of truth permeates the judicial discourse that it thematizes; as we have seen, this is attributable to the historical fact of the onetime identity of these two spheres.

It is thus fair to say that all the works examined within the purview of this study parodically engage with the Christian fixation with truth. They do so by showing the contingency of language (Atwood, Nichol, Bouchard), by blurring the line between fact and fiction (Smart,

Nichol), and by taking aim at doctrine considered unquestionably true (Tremblay, Chaurette).

They emphasize the performative power of confession to extend the boundaries of the self rather than use it as a tool for establishing a constative truth.

Fourth Tenet: The Confessant Seeks to Be Readmitted into His or Her Community

This sacrament reconciles us with the Church. Sin damages or even breaks fraternal communion. The sacrament of Penance repairs or restores it. In this sense it does not simply heal the one restored to ecclesial communion, but has

38 “refusal to offer one single vision of the world or to understand it as a coherent system, as a Whole.” 39 “unplayable, unrepresentable, total.”

also a revitalizing effect on the life of the Church which suffered from the sin of one of her members. (4.1469)

In its early incarnation, confession was a public performance that involved making one’s penitential status known to the community. From the second to the fifth century, through a process called exomologesis, the penitent announced to the community that she was purifying herself of her past transgressions through a series of real and symbolic mortifications. This process, which could only be undertaken only once in a person’s life, involved “wearing sackcloth and ashes, being relegated to a certain place within or outside the church during liturgy, and exercising penance in self-examination and extended periods of prayer” (Kidder,

2010: 16). Gradually, in the 4th and 5th centuries, this public penance began to give way to the private forms of confession practised by the desert monks of the Middle East as well as the Irish monks of the Celtic church (Kidder, 2010: 17). Subsequently, confession became a private dialogue conducted first between a penitent and her chosen spiritual advisor, and later, with an ordained priest. Annemarie Kidder hypothesizes that “[t]he rigors of public penance may have contributed to its decline both from the perspective of the laity, who had to endure its humiliation, and the clergy, who had to administer it” (2010: 24).

Whereas the original, public form of penance was meant to strengthen the community by acknowledging and forgiving a member’s deviation from the norm, it is important to point out that even the private form of confession is a self-proclaimed tool for building community. As

Christian thinker Jim Forest puts it,

My confession is an act of reconnection with God and with all the people and creatures that have been harmed by my failings and from whom I have distanced myself through acts of non-communion. The community is represented by the person hearing my confession, an ordained priest delegated to serve as Christ’s witness, who provides guidance and wisdom that helps

each penitent overcome attitudes and habits that take us off course, who declares forgiveness and restores us to communion. In this way our repentance is brought into the community that has been damaged by our sins – a private event in a public context. (2002: 18)

The purpose of a Catholic confession, as Forest indicates, is to gain readmission into the community of the faithful by performing in a private, symbolic way the kind of self-mortification that used to be undertaken through real acts of penance such as pilgrimages, fasting, and exclusion from public life. In many of the works considered in this study, by contrast, community is represented as the institutional form of dominant norms by which the characters feel constrained. In Atwood’s novel, Offred is compelled to confess in secret on a series of audiotapes because she has been barred from reading or writing by the oppressive regime under which she lives. Her purpose in confessing is to resist the silence that has been imposed upon her. Other writers similarly use their confession as a means of distancing themselves from their community: a case in point is Elizabeth Smart, who as mentioned uses the imagery of the Song of Solomon to connect her adulterous affair to an older order of transcendent love, demonstrating in the process that the morays of her society are repressive of this deeper truth. The narrator of

Les Images likewise presents herself as alienated from society; her goal in confessing is not however to conform, but rather to develop a more productive understanding of herself as an individual. The extreme individualism of these projects recalls Rousseau’s radically egocentric statement that “[j]e ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j’ai vus; j’ose croire n’être fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent” (5).40 Unlike Rousseau, however, who endeavours (however accurately) to depict both his failings and his successes, these confessions are strategically

40 “I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence” (1).

58 oriented to demarcate their speakers from their communities by critiquing their repressive morays. The characters under consideration do not confess to gain absolution and reintegration in to community life; rather, they have been driven to confess because they find themselves incapable of living under the conditions imposed by their communities.

Conclusion

Foucault’s critique of confession hinges on his awareness of its power, as a speech act, to constitute the truth it is purportedly revealing. The disciplinary underpinnings of confessional discourse become obvious when one traces it back to its Christian origins under the Medieval

Inquisition. In addition to the physical torture that the Inquistion was capable of doling out,

Sissela Bok points out that the dogmatization of confession promoted a powerful self-censure. In the wake of the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215,

[c]onfession was by then firmly established as part of the Holy Sacrament of Penance. And anxiety about what to include had risen. Depictions of the sufferings that awaited sinners after death had grown ever more specific. Many lived in terror of omitting some sins that were hard to pin down. For instance, ‘consenting to pleasure’ merely in one’s thoughts (consensus in delectationem) was a sin, which, unless confessed, could lead a person to lose his soul for eternity, according to Aquinas. But just what is an instance of such a sin? (1984: 78)

The internalization of judgment she describes bears out Foucault’s point that power functions by permeating into the very psyche of its subjects. Although the overt presence of the Church is greatly diminished in contemporary Western society, Foucault argues that its tenets remain the structuring principles of our most important and supposedly secular institutions, including law, medicine and education. It even informs our preferred genre of literature; we have moved from

“le récit héroïque ou merveilleux des ‘épreuves’ de bravoure ou de sainteté, on est passé à une

59 littérature ordonnée à la tâche infinie de faire lever du fond de soi-même [...] une vérité que la forme même de l’aveu fait miroiter comme l’inaccessible” (1976: 80).41

While the recent explosion in popularity of memoirs penned by representatives of high and low culture alike does seem to bear out Foucault’s point, it also reveals the limitations of his critique. His emphasis on truth paints with too earnest a brush a form of writing that is as much, if not more so, a product of capitalist opportunism. For every autobiographer who sincerely mines her emotional depths, there are scores of others labouring to present compelling, marketable, narratives. James Frey’s duplicitous yarn is the limit case of this phenomenon, but there are undoubtedly hundreds of other writers whose fabrications are less overt and yet equally calculated to sell books. So-called ‘reality’ television demonstrates that truth and fiction occupy two ends of a spectrum rather than opposite sides of a binary. The internet has likewise provided fertile grounds for the proliferation of confessional discourse: a cursory search furnishes links to literally dozens of websites soliciting confessions to be posted and commented on by users.

Whereas many of the previous examples are politically anodyne, my contention is that it is in fact possible to turn the confession to critical ends. The variety of confessional practices that saturate our culture necessitates a theoretical rubric capable of assessing each instance of discourse on its own terms. J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, while subject to a certain conceptual slippage he himself identifies, proves a useful lens through which to consider the praxis of writers who adopt the confessional mode in order to critique social norms. Judith Butler reveals the political stakes of Austin’s theory by showing how social norms can be exposed and challenged when a subject self-consciously re-enacts them. Like Linda Hutcheon, she uses the

41 “heroic or marvelous narration of ‘trials’ of bravery or sainthood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself [...] a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage” (Foucault, (1978) 1990: 59).

60 term ‘parody’ to describe the process of repeating a given norm or convention with variation, and identifies this process as the means by which a subject gains agency.

The writers I will consider in the chapters that follow move their characters from the sphere of victimhood into agential relationships to the world by regarding the subject as a discursive construct rather than a stable essence. Rejecting the Augustinian or Enlightenment view of the subject, they regard confession as a self-constructive rather than a self-disclosing activity. Their texts display some of the typical features of the confessional genre, such as the articulation of narratives “which claim to explain the being of the subject who is speaking, which are introspective, which utterances change her” (Taylor, 2009: 8). However, they depart significantly from the standard confession by calling into question the very tenets that typically underlie works in this genre, such as the presence of guilt and shame, the desire to speak the truth, and the need for absolution. By repeating with variation the structures of confession, their narrators come to understand their circumstances as well as the means by which to extract themselves from dominant discourses. They do so in different ways: the characters in the works by Atwood and Nichol turn the rhetoric of forgiveness on its head either by stating that they are not asking for it (Atwood 244) or by requesting it infelicitously, i.e., for things that are not technically sinful (Nichol, 1976).42 One critic argues that a major goal of The Martyrology is to construct “multiple selves” through an “I” that is constantly in flux (Davey, 1988: 60). Nichol makes use of the confessional mode in order to participate in its intimacy while simultaneously exploding the concept of a unified subject position. The same can be said of Bouchard, whose protagonist negotiates a variety of ever-fluctuating identities in the quest for her own subjectivity. Smart develops an alternative moral hierarchy in which the power of romantic love

42 Nichol’s persona states, for example, “father i confess ignorance of what the next phrase is” (1976).

61 supersedes the biblical and social injunction against adultery.43 Tremblay’s character Sandra likewise raises sexuality to the status of religion, confessing her adherence to an alternative order of corporeality. Chaurette exposes the power dynamics latent in the demand for truth and rationality, aligning coherence with persecution and death. Confessional literature, clearly, has the power to go beyond giving an account of a life lived: it can actually intervene in the discourse in order to engender a differently-oriented future. In the chapters that follow, I will accordingly demonstrate how confessional discourse has been reappropriated and repurposed to critique the very institutional frameworks out of which it emerged.

43 This moral hierarchy is expressed in lines such as “Absolve me, I prayed, up through the cathedral redwoods, and forgive me if this is sin. But the new moss caressed me and the water over my feet and the ferns approved me with endearments” (24), among others.

Chapter 2 Confessions from the Underground: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Michel Tremblay’s Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra

Introduction to Chapter 2

In this chapter, I examine Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale and Michel

Tremblay’s play Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra, two works that emerge from ‘the underground.’ The pairing of these texts may seem counterintuitive given that, on the surface, they have little to do with one another: they were written in different decades, social milieux, and genres. They also treat very different topics: Atwood’s novel is a dystopian speculative fiction set in the future, narrated by a female dissident; Tremblay’s play, set in an all-too-real Montréal, is composed of parallel monologues by a zealot and a transvestite. In spite of their differences, these works share two noteworthy features. The first of these is true of all the works under consideration here, namely that they are written in the form of confessions, specifically confessions that engage parodically with confessional discourse. The second is specific to this chapter, and unique enough to warrant the twinning of these two works. When I say that they emerge from the underground, I mean that they both thematize characters who speak from the ambivalent space of the marginalised. The concept of the underground is ambiguously coded in literature as in culture: it represents both the locus of social disenfranchisement as well as that of subversive, revolutionary activity. To ‘go underground’ is to cut oneself off from society and the sphere of meaningful activity. In addition to this negative connotation, however, ‘the underground’ refers also to the privileged space outside of mainstream culture: this is the space of underground art and music. It likewise names the sheltered space of resistance to an

63 oppressive power, as in the case of the Underground Railroad, the means to freedom from slavery. The underground always has the potential either to bury the individual or to facilitate her emancipation by providing a protected space from which to speak.44

In Atwood’s novel, the protagonist, Offred, is literally forced to go underground in order to escape a repressive regime. Her confession is only possible from within this sheltered space, given that women have been stripped of the right to free speech. In Tremblay’s play, the repression that alienates the characters corresponds to a prevailing cultural ethos; only when addressing the audience are they able to give voice to their doubts and anxieties. Damnée

Manon, Sacrée Sandra emerges from the underground in a broader, cultural sense, as well: because the play is written in popular French or joual, it brings a non-standard language into the realm of high culture. In both works, my contention is that confession functions not as a means of reinforcing hegemonic norms, as in Foucault’s discussion of the practice, but rather as a vehicle through which these very norms are critiqued. The Bible is a backdrop and an intertext in the works under consideration in this chapter, both of which take aim at the way Christian doctrine has functioned as an instrument of repression. Through their unstable confessions,

Offred, Manon and Sandra challenge the metanarratives that have ruled their lives and kept their desires in check.

The Handmaid’s Tale: Introduction

In 1985, the year following George Orwell’s famous annus terribilis, Margaret Atwood published a dystopia of her own. The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a near future in which a radical regime has transformed a section of the United States, roughly the Boston area, into the

44 A discussion of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground will provide relevant examples in this regard.

64 patriarchal, theocratic ‘Republic of Gilead’. The bulk of the novel is structured as the confession of a woman who has been given the formulaic patronymic Offred (of-Fred). Although Offred dwells at length on the mimetic difficulties of storytelling, citing problems of narrative distancing akin to Felski’s previously-cited “dialectic of intimacy and alienation” (1989: 108), the reader assumes for the most part that her account of life under the regime follows a discernably linear structure. This assumption is however dismantled in an appended section,

“Historical Notes,” in which the scene switches to an academic conference roughly 150 years in the future, where a group of scholars has assembled to study Offred’s curious narrative. We learn from Professor Piexoto that, in fact, Offred’s story was actually discovered on a series of cassette tapes hidden in a locker and subsequently arranged by Piexoto into what he determined to be a logical structure. The framing of Offred’s confession within the larger narrative of the male academic, who makes several sexist jokes at the expense of his female colleagues as well as his literary subject, expands the critique of sexism beyond the confines of Gilead. Although this patriarchal regime is a limit case, it suggests that sexist attitudes are coexistent with Western societies past and future. At the level of structure, Offred’s unstable confession is subtended by a patriachal armature into which it threatens at every minute to collapse. By the same token, however, the novel’s refusal to guarantee narrative closure, whether in the form of Offred’s own rewritings or the author’s layers of framing, is in itself a powerful critique of totalizing narratives. Atwood articulates this critique by dismantling the conventions of confession from within, confirming Susan Hekman’s contention that agency emerges in the use of

“nonhegemonic discourses [...] to destabilize and subvert hegemonic discourses” (1995: 204).

One of the main rhetorical moves in The Handmaid’s Tale is the juxtaposition of instances of capitulation to power with techniques of resistance, with Offred’s narrative representing the most effective challenge to the dominant ideology. The novel thematizes several

65 strategies of resistance to Gilead’s totalitarianism, as well as the results of such forms of activisim. The most innocuous is the kind of teasing that Offred displays with the border guard, for whose benefit she wiggles her hips suggestively. This small gesture, which she describes as

“passive” and likens to a child thumbing its nose from behind a fence, is ultimately anodyne.

Although it is an infraction of the rules, its impact is localized and politically insignificant.

Another example of a politically inert form of resistance is the Latin inscription carved into the inside of a wardrobe by Offred’s predecessor, “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” (65), “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” The stakes of performing a gesture of this kind are high: the

Handmaids are forbidden to read or write, and the discovery of an insult of this kind would likely result in torture, death or exile to the radioactive work camps of the colonies. Although the inscription does provide hope to Offred, because it is written in private, on the inside of a door, it carries little weight on the political stage. The Handmaid who made this inscription, we learn, ultimately hanged herself from a light fixture that has been removed by the time Offred moves in. Hanging is a powerful image in the novel, and a far more radical form of protest is embodied in the figures on the “Wall,” where hanged dissidents pend from hooks to serve as cautionary tales. Some, we learn, have been executed for actions they committed prior to the installation of the regime, such as the abortion doctors (41). Others, we assume, have trespassed in some other way. This is the punishment for overt resistance or behaviour that does not align with the prevailing ideology.

The only viable social critique the novel offers comes to us in the form of Offred’s narrative itself. The novel, written in the form of confession, self-consciously parodies the confessional mode inaugurated by St. Augustine and taken up by Rousseau. Whereas these writers count among their goals self-discovery, the admission of guilt and sin, the revelation of truth, and the desire for reconciliation with their respective communities, Offred’s confession in

The Handmaid’s Tale subverts and reverses these generic norms. In doing so, the text dramatizes the possibility of creative self-expression from a subordinate subject position in the face of a dominant discourse. The localized importance of this point bears upon the novel’s protagonist; its stakes, however, extend to feminism more generally. In Foucault’s account, power plays a double role in the formation of the subject. As one critic summarizes, “For Foucault, individuals are subjected, and this in a dual sense; they are subjected to the complex, multiple, shifting relations of power in their social field and at the same time are enabled to take up the position of a subject in and through those relations” (Allen, 2002: 135). Rather than simply capitulating to the system, either going crazy as one handmaid does or killing herself like another, Offred “takes up the position of subject” by casting a critical eye on her society. Her very subjectivity is formed in relation to the network of power in which she is enmeshed; she gains agency by creatively articulating her selfhood through the body of her narrative. For Susan Hekman, creativity is “indissociable” from the claiming of agency: “[a]gents are subjects that create, that construct unique combinations of elements in expressive ways” (1995: 203). Beyond simply offering a critique of the totalitarian regime in which she lives, Offred’s parodic confession thus demonstrates how it is still possible to maintain one’s subjectivity in the face of a hegemonic discourse, operating in its fissures to resist capitulating to the status quo.

Confessing in the Underground

It is vitally important that Offred’s confession issues from the underground, in the liminal space between slavery and freedom. Although the reader does not know at the novel’s end whether

Offred’s escape was successful, the clandestine nature of the tapes, discovered stashed in a locker, suggests a continued need for secrecy. The underground is a space that has occupied the imaginary of many writers: in the context of confessional narratives, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible

Man and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground are important literary precedents.45

Dostoyevsky’s novel exemplifies the negatively-coded underground: the narrator’s rejection of and by the social realm casts him into a state of abject navel-gazing from which he never emerges. In Ellison’s novel, by contrast, as in Atwood’s, the underground serves as the space from which the narrator begins the process of reflection that contains the germ of self- understanding. Reading Invisible Man alongside The Handmaid’s Tale is instructive as its narrator’s explicitness about the underground sheds light, so to speak, on questions of social recognition and agency that are highly germane to Atwood’s novel.

The unnamed narrator of Invisible Man recounts the details of his life as an African

American man in a predominantly white American culture, leading up to his eventual retreat underground. He characterizes himself as “invisible” because “people refuse to see [him]”

(Ellison, 1952: 3). The effect of this refusal is devastating: “[Y]ou often doubt if you really exist.

[...] You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish [...] and you swear to make them recognize you” (4). The equation of the absence of recognition with invisibility recalls Emmanuel Levinas’s thesis that intersubjectivity is the basis for ethics. Our duty as human beings, Levinas argues, is to acknowledge the other in his singularity. To refuse to see the other, to fail to respond to his “call”

(2006: 89) is, as we witness in Invisible Man as well as in The Handmaid’s Tale, to annihilate his status as an actor within the social economy. Levinas focuses on the image of the “face” of the other, which he describes as “meaning all by itself” (2006: 86): “it leads you beyond” (2006: 87),

“it is that whose meaning consists in saying: ‘thou shall not kill’” (2006: 87). The Invisible Man lacks the recognition of his singular identity or ‘face’ and is thus compelled to question his very

45 For a more sustained discussion of the status of these novels as confessional, see Jane Campbell (1987: 97) and Peter Axthelm (1967: 30).

68 ontological status. His desire to “make them recognize” him is of course futile, as it is impossible to forcibly extract recognition from others; the burden of the ethical relationship lies equally with them, and it is their failure that compels his retreat underground. The concepts of invisibility and lack of recognition that Invisible Man introduces are, as I will demonstrate, likewise the central problems that Offred confronts in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Although his retreat is precipitated by his anguish and frustration, and although the underground is not a desirable endpoint, it is nevertheless a necessary moment in the Invisible

Man’s quest for self-actualization. Because he cannot participate meaningfully in society, his only viable option is to mount a resistance to the status quo. Recognition is essential for action in the world; however, there is also a power in eluding the collective gaze of society, in particular the white society that has created conditions hostile to him: “it is sometimes advantageous to be unseen,” he reflects (3). Owing to his status as outsider he is able to manipulate the system, in this case by stealing a tremendous amount of electricity from the power grid in the form of hundreds of lightbulbs. The Invisible Man performs his act of luminous protest from the literal underground, in a space whose physical isolation embodies the emotional isolation that he has described throughout the novel. Although protesting in this way is less desirable than rejoining society, which he ultimately does decide to do at the novel’s end, it is important to note that the underground facilitates his living ‘off the grid’, both in the sense of living apart from it and of exploiting its resources. The metaphorical significance of his over-exposure is crucial in understanding his position: although he is underground, he is still connected to the social grid, literally ‘shedding light’ on the injustice his story describes.

In the novel’s final lines, the Invisible Man explicitly frames his confession as a praxis of resistance in a series of questions: “What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the

69 lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (581). The characterization of the reader in this final question is ambiguous: does the narrator align his reader with the oppressor or the oppressed?

Does he speak on our behalf or in our place? From the outset to this point, the reader has acted as witness to his story; now, however, the reader is summoned into the body of the narrative through the direct address of the second person. The reader realizes that she is not simply being asked to witness, but is rather implicated either as perpetrator or as victim of the social crimes the narrator relays. The narrative ‘fourth wall’ is broken when the narrator reaches out through this second person address to align himself with a larger social project in which the reader is to be interpolated.

The violation of the fourth wall is likewise a praxis of resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale, where the narrator oscillates between the use of the first and second person. The same ambiguity regarding the role of the reader characterizes Offred’s narrative, in which she is addressed by turns as a sympathetic and an antagonistic figure. Whereas Ellison’s narrator apostrophizes the extradiegetic reader directly, the target of Atwood’s protagonist’s address is both the reader as well as a narratee located within the intradiegetic world of the novel. As readers we cannot help but regard ourselves as the subject of her address; technically, however, Offred’s “you” is the citizen of the future whom she imagines finding her clandestine tapes. This doubling, as I will discuss in more detail below, is one of several forms of mediation that Atwood uses to distance the reader from the content of the narrative. Whereas Ellison addresses his reader directly to implicate him, Atwood achieves the same goal by opposite means: her reader becomes implicated in her politics by resisting the seduction of narrative closure. The Handmaid’s Tale thus structurally enacts its central message, namely the impossibility of truth and the danger of believing too fervently in any story, no matter how compelling.

(In)visible Woman

If Ellison’s Invisible Man suffers from invisibility, one could argue that Offred, analogously, suffers from hypervisibility. This intense scrutiny paradoxically precludes recognition in

Levinas’s sense because it is exercised as a form of domination. Obedience in Gilead is guaranteed by a practice of constant surveillance: the winged-eye insignia of the Gileadean police force, the “Eyes,” ubiquitously adorns buildings, cars and other structures. In addition to their overt presence, it is widely known that secret operatives are installed throughout the population, watching and reporting back on any infractions. This perpetual scrutiny has an effect similar to that of the Panopticon, a penitential structure designed by Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century. In this structure, inmates are arranged around the circumference with a guard tower stationed in the middle. Theoretically, the inmates are visible to the guard at all times, and have no way of predicting when his gaze will fall on them. Given that the exact moment of surveillance is unpredictable, the inmates must always behave as if they were being watched.

Foucault describes the Panopticon as “une machine à dissocier le couple voir-être vu” (1975:

203)46 because those who have the power to see are never seen themselves, and conversely those who are seen do not have the power to see. This penitential model is the example par excellence of the way vision functions as an instrument of power. Foucault suggests that the panoptic model penetrates beyond the walls of the prison, arguing that the “l’extension progressive des dispositifs de discipline”47 in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw Bentham’s model

46 “a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad” (1995 [1977]: 202). 47 “extension of the mechanisms of discipline” (1995 [1977]: 209).

71 take root in general society (1975: 211). “Quoi d’étonnant,” he asks, “si la prison ressemble aux usines, aux écoles, aux casernes, aux hôpitaux, qui tous ressemblent aux prisons?” (1975: 229).48

The most insidious effect of panoptic visiblility is, according to Foucault, that the person being watched incorporates the domination of surveillance into his own conscience; to that extent, he becomes the perpetrator of his own subordination:

Celui qui est soumis à un champ de visibilité, et qui le sait, reprend à son compte les contraintes du pouvoir; il les fait jouer spontanément sur lui-même; il inscrit en soi le rapport de pouvoir dans lequel il joue simultanément les deux rôles; il devient le principe de son propre assujettissement. (1975: 204)49

The ready conformism of the women of Gilead emblematizes Foucault’s statement. Aunt Lydia, one of the women responsible for promoting the values of the new regime, chillingly gives it voice in her instruction to the Handmaids that “[t]he Republic of Gilead [...] knows no bounds.

Gilead is within you” (29). Because the Handmaids never know whether one of their peers is a spy, their conversation is limited to formulaic banalities:

A shape, red with white wings around the face, a shape like mine, a nondescript woman in red carrying a basket, comes along the brick sidewalk towards me. She reaches me and we peer at each other’s faces, looking down the white tunnels of cloth that enclose us. She is the right one. “Blessed be the fruit,” she says to me, the accepted greeting among us. “May the Lord open,” I answer, the accepted response. (23)

48 “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (1995 [1977]: 228). 49 “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (1995 [1977]: 202-203).

Foucault’s insight regarding the incorporation of discipline is embodied in the robotic dialogue of the Handmaids, who know they are under perpetual scrutiny and thus, like the prisoners in the panopticon, are compelled to dress and act always as if they are being watched.

Although I have up until this point been arguing that hypervisibility is one of the characteristics of life in Gilead, it is important to point out that it is not the only technique used to control women. Other forms of domination include the outlawing of reading and writing, strict control over movement, as well as threats of exile or execution. In addition to these are mandatory uniforms, which Offred describes above. The dual purpose of the headgear, she tells us, is “to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen” (9). The puritanical theocracy demands a ‘modesty’ (276) from its women that, paradoxically, prevents them from being seen. The uniform worn by the Handmaids is reminiscent of the various forms of veiling practiced by

Muslim women, whose stories are putatively included among the papers in the folder Atwood compiled as research for the novel (“Interview” [1985] 2006, 393). Just as certain Muslim women claim that being hidden from the male gaze represents a kind of freedom,50 Aunt Lydia attempts to use similar logic to extoll the virtues of the red covering. “Modesty is invisibility,” she states. “Never forget it. To be seen – to be seen—is to be—her voice trembled—penetrated.

What you must be, girls, is impenetrable” (36).

Aunt Lydia’s claim echoes Laura Mulvey’s critique of visuality in her famous essay

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey argues that lines of sight that move in one direction serve to entrench the agency of the looker while stripping that of the object of the gaze.

She writes, “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between

50 An article in the New York Times quotes a women named Hebah Ahmad, who expresses a commonly-reported view that “[w]earing the niqab is ‘liberating,’ [...] ‘They have to deal with my brain because I don’t give them any other choice’” (Ali, 2010).

73 active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly” (1999: 837). Although she is speaking in the restricted context of film, Mulvey’s critique has become metonymic with a strand of feminism focused around the power dynamics that inhere in ‘the gaze’. Aunt Lydia’s statement is likewise framed in pseudo-feminist terms of resisting the penetrating gaze of the male subject. She casts

Gilead’s puritanical atavism as a denunciation of the sexualised images of women proliferated under late capitalism and critiqued by Mulvey. Offred, however, does not let this assertion stand; she subtly points out the inconsistency of Aunt Lydia’s message in the editorial gloss she provides: “she called us girls” (36). Aunt Lydia professes a message of female empowerment, but the real substratum of disempowerment shines through in her patronizing, or rather, matronizing, language. Her dubious use of a purportedly feminist ideology gives voice to the dangerous connection between discourse and power noted by Foucault (1980: 119). Moreover, her statement is heavily ironic given that the job of the Handmaids is, precisely, to be penetrated by the husbands of infertile women in order to produce offspring.

Aside from the Commanders’ wives and the Aunts, whose lives are comparatively autonomous (though still heavily circumscribed), many women are forced either to become

Handmaids, if they are fertile, or, if they are not, to work sweeping up radioactive waste.51 And although female sexuality is no longer the site of illegal violence, it remains a site of sanitized, institutional violence. Offred considers but rejects the term “rape” on the grounds that “nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for” (116); nevertheless, the fact that this term is in contention as a descriptor speaks to the quiet violence of the Handmaids’ lives. According to one critic, Gilead’s ideological underpinnings rest on the distinction Aunt Lydia makes between

51 Women without viable ovaries can also function as ‘Marthas’, a general class of servants.

“freedom to” and “freedom from” (31): in Gilead, “women have few sexual freedoms but their fertility is respected and they are free from the threat of sexual violence in the street,” whereas in

“the ‘before’ society [...] women enjoyed sexual freedoms but were often sexually exploited and violated” (Jadwin, 2010: 31). The ‘freedom from’ mode of existence is portrayed as nightmarish entrapment rather than emancipation, contradicting Aunt Lydia’s statement that the new way of life is “not a prison but a privilege” (8). Although women avoid being harassed in public, they are instead forced into a life of servitude to the regime.

Atwood dismantles Aunt Lydia’s equation of visibility and penetration by drawing attention to its irony (not to mention its histrionic delivery); in doing so she makes it clear that the problem is not being looked at per se, but is rather to be located in the power dynamics that attend the act of looking. In order to further complicate the matter, she suggests that the ability to elicit the male gaze can be deployed as a means of resisting the moratorium on sexual looking. In certain instances, the knowledge that one is being looked at actually constitutes a form of power:

Offred describes an exchange with a checkpoint guard, to whom she turns her face ever so slightly, eliciting his blush (26). She comments that her ability to unsettle the guard with this nearly-undetectable infraction summons for her a feeling of “possibilities” (26). As she walks away from the guard, she deliberately swings her hips a little more provocatively than is necessary, and reports,

I know they’re watching, these two men who aren’t yet permitted to touch women. They touch with their eyes instead and I move my hips a little, feeling the full red skirt sway around me. It’s like thumbing your nose from behind a fence or teasing a dog with a bone held out of reach, and I’m ashamed of myself for doing it [...] Then I find I’m not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there. (28)

Confessional overtones are detectable in Offred’s original impulse to feel “ashamed” for using sexuality as a form of power. However, she quickly rejects this moral imperative, positioning power as a higher value than adherence to conservative morays. Her analogy to taunting a dog with a bone is fitting, beyond the vulgar pun, as her “power” is precisely to elicit the guard’s unfulfilled sexual desires. Because she is aware of the strictness of the injunction preventing him from ogling her, she knows that she is able to take this small liberty. In this case, Offred’s ability to elicit the guard’s unfulfilled gaze is depicted as a limited form of power. Nevertheless, her small gesture and the reaction it produces expose the artificiality of the regime’s enforced puritanism.

Gileadean women are simultaneously under complete surveillance and therefore extremely visible, while at the same time heavily veiled and thus ‘invisible,’ as Aunt Lydia puts it. They are visible in a general sense, as undifferentiated, interchangeable pawns in a game whose rules have been devised from without. Their individuality is nullified by a regime that is always watching them but never looking at their ‘face’, in the Levinasian as well as the literal sense. Even their names, the most basic unit of self-identification, have been stripped from them, a fact which recalls the Invisible Man’s similar lack of an identifying name. Each woman in

Atwood’s novel is given a kind of possessive patronymic correlated to the name of their

Commander (Of-Fred, Of-Glen, etc.) The resultant impersonality is perhaps most literally illustrated in the procedure of ritualistic intercourse, which Offred describes with a deep sense of disembodiment: “My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the

Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body” (116). Offred’s detachment in this encounter is heightened by the fact that she is positioned between the legs of the Commander’s wife in imitation of the Biblical passage Atwood quotes in the epigraph, where

Rachel says that her maid Bilhah “shall bear upon my knees” while Jacob is inseminating her

(Genesis 30:3). Once again, the encounter is structured such that the Commander does not have to look at her face, as his perfunctory duty is entirely devoid of intimacy: “he deals with a torso only” (74).

The description of sexuality in Gilead is consistent with Foucault’s characterization of the modern Western replacement of ars erotica with scientia sexualis. In his Histoire de la sexualité he argues that the discourse surrounding sexuality has become increasingly coopted by science: sex has moved from the realm of art into the domain of science, with all the latter’s conceptual and hermeneutic apparata (Foucault, 1976: 58). The purpose of confession, the topic of which he argues is often sexuality, is “l’extorsion de la confidence selon la règle du discours scientifique”

(1976: 86-87).52 The clinicizing of sexuality in Gilead is especially overt because a crisis of infertility has occasioned the need for state intervention: pregnancy has become such a rarity that a visibly pregnant woman is a shocking sight. Offred is keenly aware of her predicament and talks frankly about the cooptation of her sexuality by the state. Her disembodied declarations such as ‘he is fucking the lower part of my body’ and ‘he deals with a torso only’ bespeak the extent to which she divorces these events from her inner life. They are characterized by a directness and a vulgarity that is notably absent from other consensual sexual relationships

Offred describes, including the first time she sleeps with her clandestine lover, Nick. In her account of this event, Offred deliberately withholds information to protect its integrity. “There wasn’t any thunder,” she admits; “I added that in. To cover up the sounds, which I am ashamed of making” (330). Directly following this admission, she tells the reader that her fabrication is symptomatic of a general impossibility of describing the feeling of human intimacy: “All I can hope for is a reconstruction. The way love feels is always only approximate” (330).

52 “the extortion of confidential evidence according to the rules of scientific discourse” (1990 [1978]: 64).

Offred’s openness about her institutionally-mandated sex life stands in stark contrast to her reticence regarding her personal love life. One way of accounting for this difference is to suggest that in her capacity as witness, she feels morally bound to detail the Gileadean atrocities in her testimony, whereas she is free to keep the details of her personal life from historical record. It is also possible that Offred is implicitly channeling Foucault’s critique of the scientia sexualis in showing the extreme to which her society has taken the instrumentalization of the body. Her confession, however, refuses “l’extorsion de la confidence” through the use of deliberate fabrications, revisions, and acknowledgments of the impossibility of writing. This same revisionist impulse resurfaces whenever Offred describes events of deep emotional significance or trauma. Regarding the fate of her husband Luke, likely killed in a botched attempt at escape, she offers the reader three possible scenarios. After detailing these, she admits,

“The things I believe can’t all be true, though one of them must be. But I believe in all of them, all three versions of Luke, at one and the same time. This contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything” (131). Offred’s insistence on multiple ways of seeing as well as the narratives strategies she uses to prevent the reader from seeing demonstrate that confession need not coincide with total access. More radically, she dismantles the very concept of narrative transparency. To tell one’s story is, for better or for worse, to interpose a layer of mediation; what matters is how one proceeds with the act of “reconstruction”

(168).

Critical Backlash

Both Invisible Man and The Handmaid’s Tale incurred a critical backlash directed at their use of mediating layers, which, some scholars contend, neutralizes their political critique. Regarding

Ellison’s novel, one critic maintains that “Homeric ambitiousness” in the form of “[l]ayer upon

78 layer of allusion” shores up the author’s “endorsement of industrial, imperialist, xenophobic

American myth making” (Baker, Jr., 1999). In the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, Chinmoy

Bannerjee has argued that the novel is unsuccessful as a form of social critique owing to the heavy mediation of framing devices. His damning conclusion is that

the novel is a pseudo-dystopia whose structure generates two levels of response: one of naive consumption through illusion and identification, the other of sophisticated enjoyment of parodic exercizes and play with illusion. At the first, or popular level, criticism is only a lure for consumption; at the second, or aesthetic level, it is dissolved through parodic frames and ultimately irrelevant. (1990: 172)

For Bannerjee, the novel hides its failure adequately to explain the logistical underpinnings of

Gilead behind its many mediating layers. He argues that any potential critique is nullified by the novel’s inability to explain the logistics of its far-fetched premise. For instance, one major oversight he identifies is the impossibility of theocratic principles overriding capitalist interest

(1990: 158-159).

Bannerjee’s attempt to dismiss the novel’s social critique on the grounds that it is unrealistic or unlikely misses the point; chillingly, the events the novel dramatizes have already occurred, in another time and place, if not in our own. By the time of the novel’s writing,

Atwood had compiled a folder of newspaper clippings regarding various abuses of women’s rights around the world, which she brought with her on her book tour (Neuman, 2006: 859). In the Author’s Note, she states, “The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale except the time and place. All of the things I have written about have [...] been done before, more than once” (1986: 392). Bannerjee is right to question the likelihood of a portion of the United States’s becoming coopted by an independent theocratic regime, and his economic calculus is convincing. Nevertheless, Atwood’s emphasis on

79 an increasing religious presence in political life is apt; the years since the book’s publication have witnessed the rise of a religious fundamentalist presence in that country intent on repealing women’s rights to sex education and abortion. Moreover, Gilead provides a snapshot of existing practices; it is a literary invention that is effective insofar as it serves to highlight real global injustice by localizing and aggregating it. If it is slightly naive in terms of its practicability, it nevertheless remains trenchant in its capacity to extend the logic of an undeniable strand of cultural puritanism to its extreme limit.

Although Atwood has been reluctant to label herself a feminist,53 she nevertheless maintains that her novel has a deeply didactic underpinning (1986: 394). The majority of scholars writing on The Handmaid’s Tale share the view that the novel is an effective form of feminist social critique. For Shirley Neuman and J. Brooks Bouson, among others, the force of this critique lies in the denunciation of “the horror of women’s consent to femininity” (Bouson,

2010: 51). Although the strictures placed on Gileadean women appear extreme, they are, according to these critics, more intense in degree rather than different in kind from existing attitudes toward women and femininity. Atwood confirms that “[t]his is a book about what happens when certain casually held attitudes about women are taken to their logical extremes”

(1986: 394). Many critics have pointed out how Offred, like Atwood herself, is deeply influenced by the feminism of the 1970s; according to Shirley Neuman, Offred “finds herself in a situation that is a fictional realization of the backlash against women’s rights that gathered force during the early 1980s” (2006: 858). The puritanical ideology of Gilead is reminiscent of evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement, founded in 1979, which

53 Atwood has on several occasions expressed her discomfort with the label of feminist. In one interview, for example, she states, “I’m a writer who is female and therefore I write a lot from the point of view of a woman. In other words I don’t see myself as a woman who is writing to promote certain things” (Lyons, 1990: 221).

80 promoted the ‘traditional’ family as well as the outlawing of abortion, homosexuality, and graphic content in the media (Jadwin, 2010: 28). Although the novel positions itself as speculative fiction, much of its content responds to very real global events.

In order to counter Bannerjee’s argument it is incumbent upon us to prove that the urgency of the novel’s critique trumps its logistical oversights. It is my contention that, while

Bannerjee is right in claiming that certain details remain unexplained, the “parodic frames” he insists dismantle the novel’s real engagement are actually, conversely, the very reason it functions as effective social critique. Whereas Bannerjee locates the novel’s parody at the level of form, in its use of framing devices, I would suggest that some of its most interesting parodic elements are present at the level of content, in its engagement with the conventions of confession: the unified subject, the necessity of truth, the presence of guilt or shame and the need for forgiveness, the desire to be readmitted into one’s community as well as the hierarchical relationship between confessor and confessant.

Dismantling the Conventions of Confession and Becoming an Agent

By “parodic frames,” Bannerjee signals the various narrative devices the novel uses to destabilize the integrity of the main narrative. These are legion: within Offred’s story itself, I have already mentioned the revisions, lacunae and deliberate withholdings by which it is punctuated. There is a further layer of contingency or mediation built into the novel, a structural irony that encodes the novel’s feminist politics. After the main body of the text, in what are described as “Historical Notes,” we learn that the narrative we have just read was discovered as a pile of tapes hidden in a locker many years later. Because the tapes were in no particular order, they had to be arranged, Professor Piexoto tells us at a conference entitled “Problems of

Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale,” into a coherent narrative by the men that

81 found them (375). The novel thus plays into the sexist trope of the incoherent woman, whose disordered words need to be given structure by the well-intentioned male authority. Freud’s investigations into hysteria canonized this kind of patriarchal pathologization of women’s subjectivity, which was already present in the Victorian era (Freud, 1953). Atwood’s rehearsal of this form of sexism is clearly ironic in its diagnosis of an attitude that persists into the contemporary era, and beyond the contemporary into the projected future. Moreover, we learn from a speaker that “[t]he superscription ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ was appended to [the reconstituted narrative] by Professor Wade, partly in homage to the great Geoffrey Chaucer”

(373). The speaker goes on to make a vulgar pun about the homophonic hilarity contained in the word ‘tale’ [tail]. After having read Offred’s confession, in what comes across as a very strong female authorial voice, the reader learns that this confession is actually named for and by a man:

‘the great Geoffrey Chaucer’, and a professor exploiting it as the means by which to advance his academic reputation. The structures that resulted in the extreme patriarchy of Gilead are shown to persist into the future, even though the Professors speak condescendingly of the repressive society of the past. The reader is therefore left with the troubling realization that even Offred’s seemingly radical and transgressive critique remains inextricably bound to the social structures it sought to overcome.

Whereas for Bannerjee the novel’s framing diminishes its critical trenchancy, I regard the novel’s formal disruption as inalienable from its politics. Before the reader knows that Offred’s confession has been reconstituted, she does not encounter a significant gap between its performative and constative elements. Although Offred is deeply aware of the contingency of narrative and continually draws the reader’s attention to the process of storytelling, the confession she makes is, putatively, straightforward and linear. However, once the reader learns that Offred’s words are heavily mediated – recorded, preserved on tape, arranged, presented at a

82 conference – a wide chasm opens between the content of her confession, dubious as it now appears to be, and its performance. Her reflection that “[i]t’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents […]” prophesies the physical manipulation her words will undergo (168). By seamlessly performing Offred’s broken confession, seducing the reader into believing in it, and subsequently dismantling its authority, the novel exposes the latent power dynamics inscribed in language. This is the insight of Irigaray and other feminist writers who worked to draw our attention to the fact that language, like any social system, is encoded with biases.54 Gilead, where women are forbidden to read or write, literalizes the patriarchal ownership of language; speaking about the commander, Offred reflects, “he has something we don’t have, he has the word. How we squandered it, once” (110). The only way to counteract these biases is to become aware of them and work to overcome them by using language in new ways. By undermining the integrity of Offred’s story, Atwood is not denying the importance of her words; rather, she is showing how even the most damning testimony can easily be reappropriated to serve the very power it seeks to speak against. She thus cautions us against being seduced by narrative, even putatively feminist narrative, into the same totalizing logic that occasioned a horror like Gilead.

By giving examples of the kind of coerced avowal theorized by Foucault as counterpoints to Offred’s emancipatory use of confession, Atwood demonstrates the distinction between two kinds of confessional practice, one that entrenches norms and another that troubles them. At a procedure called Testifying, Handmaids-in-training are compelled to reveal their

‘transgressions’: this practice is a textbook example of the way, as Foucault argues, discipline is

54 Specifically, I am referring to texts such as Irigaray’s Speculum, de l’autre femme (1974) and Éthique de la différence sexuelle (1984), as well as Cixous’s “Le Rire de la méduse” (1975).

83 incorporated into the self. In one such instance, Janine confesses to having been raped, which according to the prevailing ideology is necessarily precipitated by the woman. “It was my fault,”

Janine asserts, “It was my own fault. I led them on. I deserved the pain” (89). This confession prefigures a later incident, in which Janine is summoned to account for the disappearance of another woman. The narrator describes her as feeling guilty, “as if she was about to be punished,” even though “she was blameless” (162). Janine’s confession is exactly the kind of avowal Foucault finds so problematic: it is a process by which the subject, through the privileged mode of confessional discourse, establishes a truth about herself that bespeaks both her position of subordination relative to her interlocutors as well as the internalization of repressive social norms.

Unlike Janine, who eventually loses her mind, Offred survives by perpetually reminding herself of the contingency of narrative. This sense of contingency permeates both her means of living under totalitarian rule as well as her awareness of the conventions of narration. Whereas

Janine is quick to rehearse the official dogma, Offred remains critical of the process, noting that

“At Testifying, it’s safer to make things up than to say you have nothing to reveal” (88). Always aware of the need to exhibit the correct behaviour, Offred states, “I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I present is a made thing, not something born” (82). The deliberate construction of her identity becomes a tool of resistance, as she recognizes her compliant persona as a fabrication, a necessary conformism to the official discourse of Gilead. Her awareness of the discursive construction of identity is equally present in the narrative she offers to the reader, punctuated by revisions and self- referential commentary. In addition to these direct statements about the construction of the self,

Atwood offers more subtle indications that subjectivity and discourse are interrelated. Although

(or perhaps because) women are prevented from reading, Offred maintains an engagement with

84 language through her own private grammatical and etymological musings. Her reflections on language are always related to her consideration of her situation: pondering “[t]he difference between lie and lay” she comes to the grammatico-social realization that “[l]ay is always passive” (47). This insight of course goes beyond the linguistic to a deeper introspection: if the verb ‘lay’ “is always passive,” so too is the narrator, forced as she is into a role of subservience.

This sense of passivity is reflected in her self-abdication from the scene of intercourse with the

Commander, who “fucks [her], with a regular two-four marching stroke” (116). An extension of the narrator’s withdrawal of self is her use of grammatical musing as a form of escapism: as the

Commander labours on, Offred is led to consider “the sail of a ship. Big-bellied sails, they used to say, in poems. Bellying. Propelled forward by a swollen belly” (115). The specific imagery here corresponds to the purpose of their forced intercourse, namely the production of a viable baby. Although she is physically conforming to the dictates of the regime, her transgressive thought experiment stands in opposition to the passive compliance of her body.

Offred herself actually intuits the connection between these word-association exercises and her subjectivity:

I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can also mean a mode of execution. It is the first syllable in charity. It is the French word for flesh. None of these facts has any connection with the others. These are the kinds of litanies I use, to compose myself. (136)

Her subjectivity is discursive in the most overt sense, deliberately ‘composed’ out of the fragments of language that remain in a world in which women have been barred from reading or writing. Although Offred insists here that “[n]one of these facts has any connection with the others, these fragments actually form a mosaic of Offred’s world: chair as “leader of a meeting” is a reflection on power structures. The references to flesh and execution evoke the vulnerability

85 to which she is subject, while “charity” is of course one of the Christian buzzwords so beloved of the Giladean regime.

In Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of intertextuality in the novel, which he terms heteroglossia, the presence of multiple texts serves the political function of disrupting the forces of “verbal-ideological centralization and unification” (1981: 272). Susan Hekman regards this subversive potential as latent in the structure of language itself, which, though a closed system, nevertheless gives rise to “distinct and sometimes awesome” variations (1995: 204). By incorporating the voices of other, unsanctioned, discourses into her understanding of herself,

Offred resists the brainwashing of Gileadean ideology that, we recall, figures like Aunt Lydia would look to relegate “within” the individual (29). Another technique that Offred uses to stave off the cooptation of her subjectivity is to quote fragments of texts from her former life, such as songs and movies. The lines of “Amazing Grace” (which now “belong to outlawed sects”) run through her head at one point (67); when she secretly meets her lover, Nick, she quips, “And what’s a nice girl like me doing in a spot like this” (329), referencing a popular phrase (and the title of a short film by Martin Scorsese). Offred’s subjectivity is discursively constructed out of the fragments of history, language, and culture that are available to her in her reduced circumstances.

It is important to point out that intertextuality alone is not necessarily constitutive of an emancipatory politics: Aunt Lydia quotes Milton at the Handmaids-in-training (23), and the

Bible serves as the supposed justification for violence: “They can hit us, there’s Scriptural precedent,” Offred tells us. “But not with any implement. Only with their hands” (19). Gilead is indebted to intertextuality, founded on a radical interpretation of the Bible. Although for Bakhtin intertextuality constitutes a good in itself, what matters is how these texts are deployed; as

Richard Rorty suggests, “[t]he world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have

86 programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that” (1989: 6). Offred’s discursive construction of her identity is empowering insofar as it counteracts the dominant discourse that surrounds her. Unlike Augustine, whose confession is predicated on an identification with the truth of the Bible’s revealed wisdom, Offred deliberately fashions herself as a subject in a heteroglossic world.

Another way in which The Handmaid’s Tale challenges the conventions of the standard confession is by reversing the hierarchy between confessor and confessant. Generally, when a confessant speaks, she addresses an interlocutor capable of witnessing and pronouncing judgment according to a fixed set of moral principles. The presence of this interlocutor is crucial in guaranteeing the felicity of the speech act: recall Austin’s second postulate, which states that

“the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked” (1962: 14). In the standard confession, the interlocutor metonymously embodies the norms of the community with which the penitent speaker is looking to reconcile herself. Augustine, for example, states that God is the true recipient of his confession, with the reader playing the role of secondary audience (1961: X.iii). His stated purpose in setting forth his innermost secrets is to lay bare his conscience and establish publicly his desire to become a true Christian.

Offred’s confession does not attribute the same authority to its interlocutors. Whereas generally the confessor holds some degree of power over the confessant, here the reader- confessor is portrayed as a product of the narrator’s imagination: “I believe you into being,”

Offred states, reversing Descartes’s famous cogito. “Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are” (334). Augustine’s confession is guaranteed by the ontological certainty of God’s being as well as the indisputable authority of his Biblical edicts.

Offred’s, by contrast, is directed at an indeterminate and unstable interlocutor whom she acknowledges is potentially a mere projection of her imagination. And whereas normally the confessor serves as the spokesperson for a given set of norms, Offred locates these norms within herself, often adopting a didactic tone as she communicates her insights. In the event that the recipient of her confession “happen[s] to be a man” (168-169), she adjures,

remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest. Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn’t really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing. (168-169)

Although the repetition of the modalizer “maybe” could be seen as undercutting the certainty of her pronouncement by placing it in the hypothetical mood, the repeated modalizers actually highlight the novelty of the suggestions she posits to her imagined male interlocutor.

The suggestion she makes is radical: that “none of this is about control,” but rather about the power of forgiveness. Offred’s conflation of power and forgiveness is an insight that generally characterizes the critique of confession rather than the practice itself. Foucault, for example, suggests that “l’instance de domination n’est pas du côté de celui qui parle (car c’est lui qui est contraint) mais du côté de celui qui écoute et se tait” (1976: 84).55 Offred’s statement further deviates from the standard confessional formula by claiming more authority for herself than she attributes to her confessor, as the imperative mood in the last sentence attests. The infelicity of such an utterance is clear if one imagines a penitent stepping into a confessional booth and

55 “the agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks (for it is he who is constrained), but in the one who listens and says nothing” (1990 [1978]: 62).

88 launching into a critique of ecclesiastical doctrine. Whereas in the typical confession the penitent seeks absolution from his/her confessor, here Offred charts a power structure that operates in both directions. Offred’s words are ambiguous, however, as it is unclear whether she regards the power to forgive as the problem or the solution. One could read this statement as signifying that the real power of the regime lies in the structures of surveillance that make one feel guilty and as if one has to repent. On the other hand, it is possible that she is following the model of Nelson

Mandela, who regarded forgiveness as the only means of breaking the cycle of oppression.56

Whereas at first glance it might seem that Offred is attributing the power of forgiveness to men or to authority, a later reference to forgiveness casts her statement in a different light: “I suppose I should say I forgive whoever did this, and whatever they’re doing now,” she muses.

“I’ll try, but it isn’t easy” (244). Offred now claims the power to forgive as her own, suggesting that forgiveness is not merely capitulation to a dominant power, as posited above, but can, when claimed for oneself in full awareness of its social dynamics, constitute a form of self- empowerment. As Offred rightly points out, the granting (or witholding) of forgiveness is a powerful speech act that shores up the status of its speaker. In Gilead, women are confined to the role of confessant, never in possession of the authority that would allow them to judge others. By claiming forgiveness as an act, Offred challenges the association of women with passivity and men with activity, a gender dynamic that Second Wave feminists identified as a feature of contemporary society (Gardiner, 1995: 1-2). Through her narration, Offred deconstructs the

56 Recalling his 27 years in prison, Mandela famously stated, “As I walked out the door toward my freedom I knew that if I did not leave all the anger, hatred and bitterness behind I would still be in prison” (Rich, 2012).

89 power inherent in the act of confession; in doing so, she suggests that all social relations are fraught with power, but that only by acknowledging it can one begin to reverse its polarity.57

Offred’s confession is clearly a means by which she becomes an agent, if we agree with

Susan Hekman that “agency is a product of discourse” (1995: 202) arising when a subject uses

“nonhegemonic discourses [...] to destabilize and subvert hegemonic discourses” (1995: 204).

The text performs this subversion by juxtaposing its frame narrative—with its lacunae, metatextual interjections, and other forms of destabilization—to examples of the capitulation to hegemonic discourse, such as Janine’s coerced confession or the formulaic responses of the

Handmaids. Offred, in distinction with women such as Aunt Lydia who have fully internalized

Gileadean doctrine, continues to construct her subjectivity discursively, out of the fragments of language and culture available to her. At the same time, it is clear that her actions will remain

57 It is worth invoking, as an aside, the power of forgiveness thematized in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, insofar as it differs somewhat from that on display in Atwood’s novel. The main body of the narrative is written in the third person and recounts the disastrous, concatenating consequences of a lie Briony Tallis tells as a young girl. Jealous of a clandestine love affair she witnesses between her older sister Cecilia and a handsome young man of a lower social class, Briony falsely accuses her sister’s lover, Robbie, of raping her cousin. As a result, Robbie is sent off to war and the lovers are separated. Only at the novel’s end, when the main narrative ends and the novel jumps forward forty years, do we learn that Briony is actually the author of the text we have just completed, what we now realize is her novel, Atonement. In the first person, she tells us that her purpose in writing about the past was to atone for her mistakes. However, she is simultaneously aware that it is impossible for a novelist truly to atone because “with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God” (350). In fact, she informs us that she has actually changed the events of the novel to give her sister and her lover a happy ending, even though the reality is that Robbie and Cecilia were both killed during the war (350). For the novelist-God, Briony states, “[t]here is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her” (350). Atonement’s postmodern elements do, to a certain extent, destabilize the integrity of the confessional gesture. However, the novel ultimately ends up affirming the conventional view of confession as a speech act whose purpose is to absolve its speaker from guilt and readmit her into her community. Like Augustine, Briony publishes her misdeeds in a self-mortifying gesture that invites the reader’s judgment. Although she recognizes the impossibility of achieving forgiveness, she cites “the attempt” as her ultimate goal in writing (351). By claiming authorship of the previous narrative and subsequently coding it as a confessional speech act, Briony casts the reader into a new role: that of confessor, whose job it is to decide whether Briony has sufficiently repented to earn the atonement she desires. We as readers become vested with a certain degree of authority, a fact which is emphasized when Briony informs us precisely how her written account differed from reality, and suggests that her version will become reality for future readers (350). The reference to these future, uninitiated readers serves to shore up our authority as informed readers even further, because it implies that our judgment, unlike theirs, will be made in the full light of truth. This is of course a different philosophical trajectory than The Handmaid’s Tale, which constantly calls the reader’s authority into question by highlighting the constructed nature of narrative and the impossibility of narrative closure.

90 politically inert, like the Latin slogan carved into the closet door, unless she can find a way of reaching out to society. Ellen Messer-Davidow states clearly that in addition to the discursive formation of the subject, agency has a political dimension insofar as it “is neither a capacity of the individual nor a function of the social formation, but the co-(re)constitution of individual practices and social processes” (Messer-Davidow, 1995: 30). In other words, agency involves the interplay between the individual and the social structures she inhabits. It is not enough simply to think subversively; as the title of Messer-Davidow’s article suggests, one must “act otherwise.”

Offred’s putative attempt to link up with the fabled group of political dissenters represents her most radical form of protest. This is not, however, the only alternative community theorized in the novel, for it must be noted that Offred attempts to create a community of her own devising by consistently apostrophizing a projected interlocutor. Rather than speaking diaristically, in the mode of the dramatic self-address, Offred deliberately addresses another individual: “You don’t tell a story only to yourself,” she muses. “There’s always someone else.

Even when there is no one” (50). Having escaped the repressive confines of the Gileadean regime, she is now able, from within the tentative shelter of the underground, to become an agent. Because her new community does not yet exist, however, her words are projected into the future, at a discourse community ‘to come’. This temporality reverses the Augustinian model, which revisits past transgressions from the more enlightened vantage point of the present in order to demarcate the speaking subject from her past self. By addressing herself to future interlocutors and moreover stating explicitly that her goal is not to be forgiven (244), Offred actually begins to imagine a community in which her discourse will be understood. Rather than seek readmission into her community, Offred instead projects a more open, tolerant society whose public sphere is accessible to her. The orientation of her confession is thus very different than that of Briony in

Atonement, which is meant to exonerate its narrator from within her discourse community. In

91 order to become an autonomous actor, Offred has to emancipate herself from the totalitarian regime and orient herself toward a discourse community of her own devising. She does so in the underground, the liminal space between slavery and freedom.58

Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra: Introduction and Historical Background

Like The Handmaid’s Tale, Michel Tremblay’s Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra can be regarded as emanating from the underground. The play’s titular characters, Manon and Sandra, do not occupy the literal, clandestine underground from which Offred records her confession. Rather, they operate on the fringes of society: Manon, often mistaken for a nun, is in the thrall of a religious zealotry she regards as her late mother’s legacy. Sandra is a cross-dressing libertine whose sexual fervor is equal in its intensity to Manon’s religiosity, if opposite in its target. Both characters represent pathological responses to the extreme repression of Québécois culture in the

Grande Noirceur of the Duplessis era. Their relegation to the margins of society is a result of an extremism that prevents them from integrating into the social realm. Lacking interlocutors within their own world, Manon and Sandra are driven to confess themselves to the audience. Although the substance of each confession is unique to the character, their formal similarity prompts the reader to draw analogies between the two. As the play unfolds, the borders between the sacred and the profane begin to blur: Manon’s religious fervor becomes erotic while Sandra’s sexuality becomes spiritual.

58 The precise nature of this space is unclear as we never find out exactly where the resistance took her or under what conditions she lived out the rest of her life. Although the novel is deliberately vague regarding the details of Offred’s escape, the reader assumes that it was successful given that she managed to gain access to cassette tapes on which to record her narrative.

There is another sense in which the play can be said to be issuing from the underground, and that is insofar as it is written in joual, a working-class French spoken in Montreal. Before

Tremblay, joual was a fully oral demotic French with no corresponding typography and an extremely marginal place on the Quebec stage. Tremblay actually had to develop a lexical system so that it could be faithfully reproduced for the theatre. The 1968 production of Les

Belles-Soeurs, the opening installment in the eight play cycle that concludes with Damnée

Manon, Sacrée Sandra, marked the first time that a play written entirely in joual had ever been performed on such a large scale. It is not possible to overstate the “scandale” provoked by the incursion of the vernacular into a space hitherto reserved exclusively for ‘high’ French (Dargnat,

2007: 8). This vernacular, Mathilde Dargnat argues, was “doublement déprécié”59 by both the

Anglophone majority as well as French-speaking purists, who resented what they perceived as a corruption of the language (2007: 30). While some Francophones were excited to see it take centre stage, many regarded it as “une forme de blessure propre au Canadien français, symbole d’une humiliation collective”60 (Biron et al., 2007 : 456). According to linguist Paul Daoust, the controversy surrounding the use of joual in popular culture was, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the subject of great discussion, with an average of three articles published per week debating its usage. From 1960-1975, he documents a total of 2523 articles on the topic, 90 per cent of which come out against joual (Biron et al., 2007: 457). The controversy surrounding

Tremblay’s “acte de langage” (Dargnat, 2007: 9) revealed a schism within Québécois

Francophone culture itself:

Le mépris de ladite parlure est donc aussi mépris des individus qui la parlent. Il a pour conséquence un clivage au sein de la population francophone du Québec. La

59 “doubly disparaged” [Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.] 60 “a kind of wound specific to the French Canadian, the symbol of a collective humiliation.”

minorité élitaire qui s’était battue au nom d’une communauté qu’elle croyait unitaire, prend conscience que la majorité des Québécois ne parlent pas comme elle. (Dargnat, 2007 : 28)61

Having fought under a united banner to gain rights for Francophones – Bill 101, a central piece of legislation entrenching French as the official language of Quebec was passed in 1977, the same year Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra was first performed – French-speaking Québécois were suddenly confronted with their own differences.62 Now that French had been officially legislated, debate erupted about precisely what kind of French could or should be included within the national collective identity.

Beyond simply moving Québécois culture into the international spotlight, Tremblay’s plays add nuance to the outsider’s perspective by demonstrating the internal divisions that inhere in the complex, non-homogeneous French-speaking population. In Les Belles Soeurs, the character Lisette de Courval, who painstakingly adjusts her speech to sound more Parisian, regales her friends with vacation stories that demonstrate the superiority of Europeans. The same identity politics are thematized in Sainte Carmen de la Main, another play in the cycle, which dwells at length on the necessity and the difficulty of speaking one’s language when that language is deprecated by its own speakers, not to mention the rest of society: Carmen is a rodeo singer who begins her career singing the songs of others and dreaming of one day being able to perform in “[u]n style à moé! J’ai commencé avec des paroles des autres pis des musiques des autres mais peut-être j’pourrais finir avec des paroles de moé pis de la musique de moé!”

61 “Contempt for that way of speaking is thus also contempt for those who speak that way. The consequence is a split within the Francophone population of Quebec. The elite minority that had fought in the name of a community it believed to be unified becomes aware that the majority of Québécois do not speak like them.” 62 Bill 101 (also known as ‘The Charter of the French Language’) was passed by René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois government on August 26, 1977. It reaffirmed and elaborated many of the principles set out in Bill 22 (the ‘Official Language Act’), passed in 1974, which officially designated French as the sole official language of Québec.

(Tremblay, 1989 : 74).63 When she comes back home to the Main, the red-light district of

Montreal, after a sojourn in Nashville, she begins performing in French for the inhabitants of her neighbourhood, who are deeply moved; one person gushes that “Carmen a chanté que mon histoire était belle pis que moé j’étais une chanson d’amour endormie dans une taverne”

(Tremblay, 1989 : 60).64 However, in an ending deeply inflected with allegorical significance,

Carmen is murdered by her manager, who wants her to keep singing in English and is intent on preventing her from performing in her native language. In all of his plays, Tremblay explores what it means to speak in one’s own tongue, whether in the broad sense of a language or in the more restricted sense of a sociolect: differences within a language, he demonstrates, can be as significant and socially divisive as differences between linguistic groups. In English Canada,

Tremblay serves as a window into the ‘other solitude’; however, it is important to point out that many Québécois likewise encounter his language and characters from the point of view of the outsider.

When asked about his own decision to write in “un style à moé,” Tremblay answered,

J’avais commencé depuis longtemps à régimber, pendant les cours de français, à me révolter devant le simplisme du style qu’on nous imposait pour nos compositions : sujet, verbe, complément, et dans cet ordre, s’il vous plaît. Le moins d’inversions possibles, elles brouillaient le sens de la phrase, et pas d’incises. [...] Lorsqu’ils jugeaient que j’avais dépassé les bornes, ils me remettaient mes copies bardées de rouge et de commentaires [...] ‘Aviez-vous la fièvre, quand vous avez pondu ce torchon?’ (Dargnat, 2007 : 27-28)65

63 “My own style! I started out with other people’s words and music, but maybe one day, I’ll have my own words and my own music” (Tremblay, 1991: 56). 64 “Carmen said my life is beautiful, that I’m a love song asleep in a tavern” (Tremblay, 1991: 46). 65 “I had started a long time ago to balk, during my French courses, to revolt against the simplistic style that was imposed on us for our compositions: subject, verb, object, and in that order, please. The fewest inversions possible,

His transgressive literary praxis, like Offred’s in The Handmaid’s Tale, defies the conventions of writing imposed upon him. However, whereas Offred writes from the space of the underground and directs her words at a future audience, Tremblay moves his language from the underground into the mainstream as a means of legitimizing not only the language itself but moreover the narratives of its speakers. In order to paint the portrait of his world as he saw it, Tremblay had to bring joual from the underground into the bright lights of the stage. Much as Courbet’s socialist- realist painting The Stone Breakers scandalized attendees of the 1850 Paris salon with its unprecedented depiction of two working-class men toiling under a hot sun, Tremblay’s play shocked Québécois audiences with its realistic portrayal of blue-collar Montreal. His portraits are far from flattering—characters are narrow-minded, petty, conniving, and often vulgar; after viewing the premiere of Les Belles-Sœurs, Martial Dassylva of La Presse apparently commented that he “ had never before heard in one evening ‘autant de sacres, de jurons, de mots orduriers de toilette’”66 (Malone, 2003). Tremblay’s aim was not to romanticize the working class, nor, like

Courbet, to make one specific political statement. His goal was to write entertaining, believable plays set in his own reality, “a kind of theâtre-vérité which might make you cringe, but whose faithfulness to life you could not deny” (Usmiani, 1982: 3). While Tremblay was outspoken about his political views, including his commitment at the time to the separatist movement, he resisted overt didacticism in his works, preferring instead an allegorical method. In a 1978 interview with the CBC, Tremblay stated, “I know what I want in the theatre. I want a real

they muddied the meaning of the sentence, and no interjections. When they felt I’d gone over the limit, they would hand me back my copies covered in red and in comments: ‘Did you have a fever, when you wrote this drivel?’” 66 “as many curses, swear words, trashy words.”

96 political theatre, but I know that political theatre is dull. I write fables” (“L’enfant Terrible”,

1978). Nevertheless, just as a fable demands that its reader ruminate on its moral, Tremblay considered it essential that his audience react to the situations portrayed on stage: “J’veux pas faire passer de bonnes soirées au monde... J’veux qu’ils réagissent, en ayant peur, en braillant, en riant, en se disant ‘Il faut que ça change’”67 (Usmiani, 1982: 21). The political implications of the new form of theatre were of course immediately seized upon by critics, who hailed the premiere of Les Belles Sœurs as “the dawn of a new era of liberation, both political and aesthetic” (Usmiani, 1982: 30).

Although Tremblay’s work is larger than life, often borrowing from the conventions of ancient Greek tragedy and the epic, his meticulously-crafted dialogue produces an effect of realism. Some critics have extended the realism beyond the world of the text to the life of the author himself, and have accordingly been led to read his works autobiographically. In addition to the verisimilitude of the language and setting of his plays, critics have also seized upon the playwright’s periodic use of either the first person or other self-referential devices that draw attention to his role as creator. One such example is his particular use of stage directions: beyond merely communicating logistical information, he uses them to give insight not just into the psychology of his characters but also into his own motivations qua creator. In À toi pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou, an earlier installment of the Belles-Soeurs cycle in which we are introduced to the character of Manon, the playwright informs us that “j’ai voulu ‘installer’

Marie-Louise et Léopold [Manon’s parents] dans les endroits où ils sont le plus heureux au monde” (1971: 35)68 before going on to describe the actual set. Tremblay atypically incorporates

67 “I don’t want to provide people with a nice evening... I want them to react, by feeling afraid, by crying, by laughing, by saying to themselves, ‘This has to change’.” 68 “I wanted to ‘plant’ Marie-Louise and Leopold in their favourite spots” (1990: 4).

97 his personal thought process into a paratextual69 device whose modality is usually, if implicitly, hortative: stage directions traditionally tell the director, actors, or reader what to do, rather than provide access to the playwright’s desires. The use of the first person in this instance is one of several ways Tremblay writes himself into the work. While stage directions are only read, in

Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra, Tremblay inserts himself into the spoken dialogue. In the closing lines of the play, the playwright refers to himself by name: Manon first suspects that she exists “juste dans la tête de quelqu’un d’autre”70 and then admits to having been “inventée... par... Michel” (65).71

Asked in an interview about his decision to incorporate self-referential elements into the play, Tremblay responded that “Depuis onze ans, j’avais tout fait pour me cacher derrière mes personnages. Ici, j’ai créé cette dichotomie entre les deux personnages pour montrer que l’auteur est toujours au coeur de ce qu’il écrit” (Boulanger, 2001: 92).72 As the final play in a twelve-year cycle, Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra represents a significant milestone in Tremblay’s oeuvre.

The desire among scholars to interpret this final instalment as the author’s personal confession is reminiscent of the similarly self-referential readings of Prospero’s speech in The Tempest, which many consider Shakespeare’s personal farewell to the stage.73 Critics such as Gilbert David have taken Tremblay at his word, positing that the writer is not merely a background presence but actually the model for many of the characters that occur within his stories. David argues that

69 The term is Genette’s (9). 70 “only[...] inside someone else’s head” (42). [All translations of Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra are John Van Burek’s.] 71 “invented...by...Michel” (43). 72 “For the past eleven years, I’d done everything to hide myself behind my characters. Here, I created this dichotomy between the two characters to show that the author is always at the heart of what he writes.” 73 This view, which is at the very least mentioned in most critical work on The Tempest, was first articulated by Thomas Campbell in 1838 (Vaughn and Vaughn, 1991: 105).

“[l]e monde de la rue Fabre grouille des alter ego (masculin, féminin, androgyne) et des projections artistiques ([...]des écrivains, des conteurs, des chanteurs à texte) du prolifique auteur montréalais” (1993: 151-152),74 emphasizing the play’s ‘autobiographical’ content (1993: 153).

In his reading, Manon and Sandra are reflections of the playwright’s own superego and id; the play is thus “le lieu priviligié d’une crise ouvertement intime” (1993: 153).75 Renate Usmiani also espouses this view, stating that “this work is set within the mind of the poet himself, with the protagonists Manon and Sandra representing opposite and complementary aspects of their creator’s personality” (1982: 130). She makes the confessional dimension of this argument overt, characterizing the play as “the most autobiographical of Tremblay’s works, an intimate confession” (Usmiani, 1982: 130). In the same vein, Pierre Filion suggests that “Damnée Manon,

Sacrée Sandra doit être considérée comme un testament d’auteur, très personnel, qui fait tomber les derniers masques sous lesquels se retranchait le personnage suprême, le dieu du cycle, dissimulé derrière les visages de Sandra et de Manon” (1977: 10).76

David, Usmiani and Filion are too extreme in their conflation of art and life. Their justification for calling the play autobiographical is based on two arguments: first, that Manon and Sandra are avatars for Tremblay, and second, that the writer names himself in the text.

However, it is important to point out that in addition to designating the playwright, the name

“Michel” also belongs to a little neighbourhood boy with whom we first learn Manon played as a child, and who we subsequently find out is, or was, Sandra. Tremblay thus suggests the onomastic correspondence while also guarding against the simple mapping of the biographical

74 “The world of the Rue Fabre is teeming with alter egos (masculine, feminine, androgynous) and artistic projections (writers, storytellers, singers) of the prolific Montreal author.” 75 “The privileged site of a clearly intimate crisis.” 76 “Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra must be regarded as a very personal author’s testament, which peels away the last masks under which were hidden the supreme character, the God of the cycle, concealed behind the faces of Sandra and Manon.”

99 onto the fictional. Recalling Lejeune’s definition of autobiography, which stresses the identity of author, narrator and character (1975: 12), it is a stretch to attribute all of these functions to the empirical Michel Tremblay. Therefore, if Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra can be regarded as the author’s confession, it is not the kind of straightforward, autobiographical confession that David and Filion describe. However, there is a certain restricted use of the term ‘confession’ that I believe does come close to describing Tremblay’s presence within his plays: in the Christian tradition, confessing can also mean “articulating one’s most deeply held convictions” (Lose,

2003: 63)77 in the context of preaching. In Catholicism, to ‘confess’ the truth of Christian doctrine is to profess the truth of the Bible as well as one’s adherence to it.78 In this vein, it is possible to regard this play as a profession of the author’s take on his society. The exclamatory nature of the play’s opening scene suggests that this type of confessional discourse is in fact operative within the text:

MANON: Pis moé je l’ai trouvée, la vérité! SANDRA: Quand c’est rendu que tu prendrais n’importe quoi, le cul de n’importe qui pourrait te satisfaire même si y faisait ça n’importe comment! MANON: Le bon Dieu est au boute de toute. SANDRA: D’abord que ça reste du cul. MANON: Le bon Dieu est au boute de toute. (8)79

77 David J. Lose goes to great pains to distinguish this restricted form of confession from the other ways in which the term is used: “In seeking to use confession to describe preaching, however, I must undertake self-consciously a project of reclamation, as confession can be understood in a variety of ways: criminals confess their crimes, penitents their sins, believers their faith, and lovers their passion. [...] It will therefore be important to describe clearly how confession has functioned as a distinctly Christian term and practice” (2003: 63). 78 A related usage of confession to signify ‘profession of faith’ appears in the ‘Credo’ of the Roman Catholic mass, which contains the line Confiteor/unum baptisma in remissionem peccatorum, ‘I confess one baptism for the remission of sins’. 79 MANON: And me, I’ve found the truth! SANDRA: When you get to the point where you’ll take no matter what, then a fuck from no matter who will make you happy, no matter how badly he does it. MANON: God is at the end of everything. SANDRA: As long as it’s still a fuck.

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The language here is credal: Manon speaks in the Christian terms of truth and ultimate meaning.

For her, “la vérité” is to be found in “Le bon Dieu,” whom she reiterates is “au boute de toute.”

Sandra likewise professes her adherence to the order of the flesh, “le cul.” The juxtaposition of the two positions occurs not only through their contrapuntal exclamation, but moreover through

Tremblay’s use of a pun: the words “au boute de toute,” “at the end of everything,” simultaneously evoke the metaphysical and the corporeal. For Manon, “au boute de toute” is

God, the alpha and omega, whereas for Sandra, more or less everything ends at the genitals.

Tremblay’s own profession, namely the critique of dogmatism and social repression, emerges in the juxtaposition of Manon and Sandra’s statements, both of which represent undesirable extremes: slavish adherence to dogma, on the one hand, or radical rebellion, on the other. These statements begin to gesture towards another theme Tremblay will explore throughout the play, namely the existential vacuum created with the waning of the Church as a dominant institution, as the hysterical fervour of these initial pronouncements gives way to the characters’ admissions of profound uncertainties.

Although his reading of the play clearly differs from my own in terms of its emphasis on autobiography, David does make the important point that all of Tremblay’s plays operate on two levels: the individual and the social. The specific situations and dialogue that occur on stage set up an allegory for a broader social commentary that the playwright is making: David identifies the play’s sociological passages as constitutive of the “epic” register; he states that they “n’ont de sens en tant qu’informations ou commentaires clairement destinés au public, et, au-delà, à la

MANON: God is at the end of everything” (9).

101 société tout entière” (1993: 158).80 He juxtaposes these to the “lyric” passages of the text, which are not meant to shore up the text’s broader political message but simply to convey characters’ unique stories, their hopes and fears. Although the term ‘autobiography’ is inapplicable to

Tremblay’s project, it is important to correlate the epic dimension of the play to the writer’s particular social vision. Investigating this vision is more provocative than attempting to perform an autobiographical reading of the play.

David’s use of the term ‘epic’ is particularly fitting given that the function of a classical epic is in part to establish the mythological fundaments of a given people.81 Usmiani emphasizes the “mythopoetic intention of the author, which is less to create individual, self-contained ‘plots’ than to produce a mosaic or epic of his people” (1982: 21). By elevating his culture to the epic level, however, Tremblay performs a double, paradoxical gesture: on the one hand, he gives it value by creating its mythology. At the same time, the amplification characteristic of epic heroes and plotlines also functions to magnify the dysfunctions and pathological dynamics to larger- than-life proportions. Just as the controversy over joual hinged on the question of whether it should be flaunted or suppressed, Tremblay’s ‘social confession’ is transgressive insofar as it simultaneously elevates and condemns his culture.

Structural Parallels

In Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra, a deep inertia characterizes the narrative of both characters and serves as a trenchant allegory for the legacy of La Grande noirceur. Likewise in À toi pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou, Tremblay’s stage directions stipulate that “[l]es personnages ne bougent

80 “only make sense in their capacity as information or commentary clearly aimed at the public, and beyond that, at society as a whole.” 81 While epic poetry serves many functions, among them is a political agenda. As Fritz Graf suggests, “some myths account for societal institutions” (1993: 39). See also Walter Burkert’s Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual, where he defines myth as “narratives of collective importance” (1982: 23).

102 jamais et ne se regardent jamais. Ils regardent droit devant eux” (1971: 36).82 Because the characters in this play do not communicate directly with each other, the impact of the characters’ words on the audience is heightened as their lines are spoken directly to them, even when the purported interlocutor is another character. Another effect of this choice is that the action of À toi pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou becomes very static, representative of a deeper social and cultural stasis at which the playwright is taking aim: this immobility is thematized in multiple relationships, including that of the parents, whose dysfunctional arguments have been repeated for decades, as well as their child Manon, who is accused by her sister of being unable to move beyond a pathological mourning for their dead mother (Tremblay, 1971: 40).

In Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra, as in À toi pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou, Tremblay indicates that the action is to take place in two separate spheres from which the characters will proceed to deliver their “confessions” (31).83 The ideological chasm separating the two titular characters is embodied for the spectator in terms of a visual opposition, indicated by the stage directions that open the play: “Dans sa cuisine complètement blanche, Manon, une dévote toute vêtue de noir, se berce. Dans sa loge complètement noire, Sandra, un travesti tout vêtu de blanc, se fait les ongles” (27).84 The chiasmic mise-en-scène is revelatory on a symbolic level, playing on the associations we have with the colours white and black. Manon, the religious zealot, whom

Tremblay calls a “point final” on the religious era in Québec (Boulanger, 2001: 92), is positioned in a room painted the colour of purity and virginity. Her unadorned black clothes evoke, on the

82 “Marie-Louise and Leopold never move, never look at one another. They stare straight ahead” (4). 83 Several pages into the script, as the characters prepare to begin their narratives, Tremblay specifies, “Long temps, comme si les deux personnages préparaient leurs confessions” (31). [“There is a long pause, as if both characters were preparing their confessions” (10).] 84 “In her kitchen, which is completely white, Manon, who is very devout and all dressed in black, is rocking. In her ‘dressing room,’ which is completely black, Sandra, a transvestite who is all dressed in white, is doing her nails” (7).

103 one hand, the simple dress of nuns and other religious adherents. At the same time, however, black is the colour of mourning, a state Manon has been in since the death of her mother many years before. Black clothing can also have the opposite significance to religious piety: it is the colour associated with witches and the occult. This association becomes particularly significant when we later learn that Manon’s relationship to religious iconography is inflected with a dark idolatry. Sandra, conversely, is entombed in a dark chamber whose symbolic valence is largely related to her social role. The extent to which her confession issues from the underground is confirmed by the dark space to which she is relegated on stage. The darkness evokes not only

Sandra’s physical isolation from society, but moreover associates her marginal sexuality with the unknown, the occult, and the evil. Offsetting this association, however, is the fact that Sandra is dressed in white. It is unclear at the beginning of the play exactly what this colour-coding is meant to signify, particularly insofar as it is contrasted with Manon’s black outfit. Is the white dress meant as an ironic counterpoint to the distinctly unchaste monologue Sandra will proceed to deliver? Or is it meant to redeem the hypersexualised transvestite from the pejorative discourses that surround her by drawing the viewer’s attention to a more fundamental human purity? Moreover, Sandra is painting her nails green, a colour with which she is associated throughout the play, at one point calling herself “Sandra-la-verte” (46). Green is a colour that is outside the conservative sartorial spectrum (especially with regards to nail polish), but one to which are attributed no definitive moral connotations outside the world of the text.85

85 As the play progresses, we learn that green nail polish is associated throughout with marginal, so-called deviant characters, beginning with Sandra’s cousin, Thérèse, who wore it as a child “[p]our faire chier sa mère” (38) [“to drive her mother crazy” (16)] and reaching its apex in Sandra’s assertion that she is going to cover her lover in green graffiti, “y enduire le sexe de sang vert” (46) [“anoint his sex with green blood” (23)] and then ‘crucify’ him “par la colle verte” (46) [“with green glue” (24)].

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The moral uncertainty suggested by the play’s mise-en-scène is borne out by the characters’ confessions. In their opening lines, Manon and Sandra profess their adherence to opposing doctrines: whereas for the former, “La solution à toute…c’est le bon Dieu,”86 the latter informs us contrapuntally that “Y’a pas de qui, y’a pas de quand, de où, de pourquoi, la réponse c’est toujours le cul” (27).87 It is tempting to read these statements as metonyms for the periods before and after the Révolution tranquille. Manon’s faithful adherence to religious dogma is in keeping with the conservative values of early-twentieth-century Québécois society, whereas

Sandra’s sexual libertinism, her celebration of “le cul,” occurs in the context of more open attitudes to sexuality, particularly homosexuality, in the 1970s. However, the blending of the two monologues, fully realized by the play’s end, suggests that both forms of extremism are equally pathological and ultimately empty. David maintains that Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra should be regarded as a postmodern play as it dramatizes the way in which “en se substituant à Dieu, l’individu moderne voit ouvrir devant lui le gouffre de sa liberté, dans l’exaltation et l’angoisse de n’avoir plus que lui-même comme raison dernière de son destin” (153-154).88 David’s statement applies not only to the godless Sandra, as we quickly come to realize that hidden behind Manon’s zealotry is a deep sense of alienation and doubt. The fact that both characters make use of the form of confession demonstrates their indebtedness to ecclesiastical tradition.

However, the content of both confessions dismantles any kind of religious adherence by questioning or overtly denying the presence of God, refusing to accept moral culpability, and

86 “The solution to everything…is God” (7). 87 “It doesn’t matter who, doesn’t matter when, where or why, the answer is always to fuck” (7). 88 “by substituting himself for God, the modern individual sees opening before him the chasm of his liberty, in the exaltation and the anguish of having nothing but himself as the final meaning of his fate.”

105 distancing the speakers from their respective communities. This parodic use of confession situates this play within the genre of postmodernist literature, which Linda Hutcheon defines as

art that is self-consciously art (or artifice), literature that is openly aware of the fact that it is written and read as part of a particular culture, having as much to do with the literary past as with the social present. Its use of parody to echo past works signals its awareness that literature is made, first and foremost, out of other literature. (Hutcheon, 1988:1)

Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra demonstrates both self-awareness as an artistic product and a repackaging of Biblical content.89 The play’s overt challenging of Christian doctrine as well as its metatextual conclusion display “l'incrédulité à l’égard des métarécits” (Lyotard, 1979: 7)90 that Lyotard associates with the postmodern. Tremblay’s target in this play is the metanarrative par excellence of modern Western culture. His skepticism of Christianity, shared by many twentieth-century critics, is steeped in the particular history of repression enforced by the

Catholic Church in Quebec.

Tremblay’s twinning of Manon and Sandra’s confession sets up a contrapuntal dialogue between the two characters. Their opening professions of faith, in which they announce their allegiance to opposite (meta-)physical orders, are the beginning of a sustained juxtaposition that creates dialectical tension. Sandra’s contradictory assertions at the end of the play that Manon is

“ma soeur, ma jumelle”91 but also “[m]on antithèse, mon contraire” (62)92 can be read as

89 Hutcheon identifies the Bible as the original background text for the working class and thus the backbone of literary parody (1985:44). 90 “incredulity toward metanarratives” (1979: xxiv). 91 “my sister, my twin” (39). 92 “my antithesis, my contrary” (40).

106 governing the structure of the work as a whole. As the two characters speak, a parallel emerges, as Usmiani usefully summarizes:

In their confessions, each character takes us through the activities of the day, which follow a pattern consisting of complementary variations on basically identical situations: Manon awakens in the morning, Sandra in the afternoon; both have a sudden, inexplicable impulse to purchase a particularly outrageous tool to be used in the exercise of their separate professions or avocations – a grotesquely oversized rosary in the case of Manon, a grotesquely coloured set of lipstick and nail polish for Sandra. (Usmiani, 1982: 134)

The parallels occur not only on the level of action, but moreover in the topics addressed by each character in her dialogue: when Manon talks about trying to decipher God’s messages (44),

Sandra fantasizes inscribing “[d]es graffitis secrets, des brouillons hermétiques”93 on the body of her lover (45). When Manon recounts her sheltered, static life (57-59), Sandra likewise describes her unchanging life on the Rue Fabre (61). The formal parallels necessarily take the form of thematic and expressive oppositions: religion is always offset by sexuality; the “serious and sincere tone” by a “flippant, cynical and [...] bawdy sort of humour” (Usmiani, 1982: 135). The structural analogy between the two confessions formally enacts Tremblay’s social critique: the failure of both characters to achieve fulfilment, albeit by opposite means, represents the existential vacancy of a repressed society.

Infelicitous Confessions

The best way to understand Tremblay’s social critique is to regard Damnée Manon, Sacrée

Sandra’s two monologues as infelicitous confessions. Other conceptual rubrics have been proposed: David names the play a ‘maieutic’, a Greek word meaning self-interrogation (1993:

93 “Secret graffiti, hermetic signs” (23).

107

152). David’s readiness to interpret the play from within this framework is understandable given

Tremblay’s frequent inclusion of elements from ancient tragedy such as the chorus in Sainte

Carmen de la Main.94 However, it is my contention that the play is better understood as an infelicitous Christian confession rather than a felicitous Greek maieutic.

The maieutic self-interrogation is premised on the idea that truth abides in the mind of every human being, who is capable of accessing it only by systematically answering a series of logical questions or problems. The most famous proponent of this method is Socrates, whose lengthy interrogations are recounted in Plato’s various dialogues. The Greek idea of confession as self-interrogation is, as discussed in the previous chapter, the only kind of which Foucault approves, for the aim of ancient practices “is not […] to decipher a hidden truth in the depth of the individual. […] It is to give the individual the force of truth. Their aim is to constitute the self as the ideal unity of will and truth” (Foucault, 2007:170). Whereas the ancient conception of truth involved the subject’s active participation in its construction, the Christian hermeneutics of self made confession the process of evaluating one’s deviation from a pre-given dogma. Foucault approves of the ancient version of confession because it remained bound to a practice of self- care: “In Greco-Roman culture knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of taking care of yourself” (Foucault, 1988: 22). In Christian culture, where self-knowledge has been elevated to the order of a science, confession functions as a form of discipline rather than self care, as its purpose is to enforce social norms.

While provocative, David’s thesis breaks down when one considers the explicitly

Christian orientation of Manon’s confession. Her central conflict is her inability to reconcile her

94 Tremblay was an avid reader of classical texts. As Usmiani notes, “He has always retained an enormous admiration for the formal perfection of Greek tragedy, especially the choral tragedies of Aeschylus. Without this classical background, he would never have been able to achieve the complex musical structures, largely based on choral techniques, which constitute the major artistic merit of his plays” (1982: 16).

108 religious convictions with the unchaste desires of her body. Even Sandra, who utterly renounces

Christian virtue, remains bound up within a Christian worldview. Her perversions are expressed in the very language of the dogma she rejects: regarding her lover, aptly named Christian, she tells us, “J’vas écrire un livre pornographique sur son corps. Ma Bible à moé. La Genèse selon

Sandra-la-Martienne! Le Pentateuque, le Cantique des cantiques, l’Ancien Testament pis le

Nouveau Testament selon Sandra-la-Verte! Pis surtout, l’Apocalypse selon moé!” (46).95 Her postmodernist parody bawdlerizes the Christian idea of the word made flesh, literalizing it to the point that it becomes sexual. This form of parody is similar to that of Leonard Cohen in Beautiful

Losers, published in 1966. Hutcheon’s statement about that novel holds equally true of

Tremblay’s play, where “[t]he official church discourse […] is parodically inverted in form and content. There is a specific and wholesale transfer from the elevated, spiritual, ideal plane to the material and bodily reality of life” (Hutcheon 1985: 73). Likewise in Damnée Manon, Sacrée

Sandra, both characters end up fusing religion and sexuality such that one becomes indistinguishable from the other.

Although they are engaging with the Christian tradition, the confessions that the characters make deviate from it significantly. On the surface, Manon’s confession appears consistent with the standard Christian prototype, plagued by guilt and oriented towards forgiveness; however, it becomes clear on deeper examination that her confession is far from typical. Although she does frame her avowal in terms of guilt and shame, she ends up railing against God, the process of self-examination having pushed her to recognize the futility of the cloistered life she has inherited from her mother. The playwright critiques the Church from

95 “I’ll write a pornographic book on his body. My own Bible. The Book of Genesis according to Sandra the Martian. The Pentateuch, the Song of Songs, the Old Testament and New Testament according to Sandra the Green. And above all, the Apocalypse according to me!” (23).

109 within by showcasing the intensely flawed version of devotion practised by a putatively faithful adherent: ironically, Manon’s religious fervour is masking a host of sinful lusts. In fact, her monologue reveals the presence of several of the so-called ‘deadly sins’, including wrath, greed, pride, lust and envy, which Manon goes to great lengths to minimize. Her first questionable act is her purchase of a gigantic oversized rosary, “[u]n beau rouge vin” with “la croix [...] en bois noir” (33).96 Tremblay’s close attention to colour is evident in the suggestive colour scheme of what Pierre Filion has called the “grains fortement sexualisés” (1977: 12). The rosary is so enormous that later a woman mistakenly thinks she has bought it for a church (35). She admits that she is deeply compelled by its aesthetic qualities, having chosen to shop at St. Joseph’s

Oratory because “c’est là qu’on en trouve le plus… pis on trouve les plus beaux” (31).97 Having virtually impoverished herself to buy this giant artifact, Manon informs us that she doesn’t even have time to get it blessed because “J’avais trop hâte de voir de quoi y’arait l’air, là ousque j’voulais l’installer” (35).98 The purchase of the rosary is steeped in envy, pride and the greed that in Manon’s own words causes her to have “frôlé pas mal le pêché de pas mal proche juste de penser que quelqu’un d’autre pouvait acheter mon chapelet” (32).99

Manon is to a certain extent aware of the problematic nature of her preference for the physical rosary over its religious symbolism. Perpetually looking for proof of God in signs and portents, what she calls “déchiffrer les messages” (44),100 she sights a prayer book lying at the bottom of a garbage can and reads it as a sign that “le bon Dieu voulait que je sacrifie mon beau

96 “A beautiful wine red. And the crucifix is in black wood” (12). 97 “they have the best selection...and the most beautiful” (10). 98 “I was too anxious to see how it would look in the place where I wanted to put it” (14). 99 “I think maybe I almost committed a sin there, just thinking that someone else might buy my rosary” (11). 100 “interpret the messages” (22).

110 chapelet si beau pis qui m’avait coûté si cher pour l’aider à sauver les péchés du monde!”

(41).101 Likening herself to Abraham (44),102 Manon prepares to make the ultimate sacrifice, throwing her rosary into the garbage bin. When a young neighbourhood boy makes fun of her, however, she snatches the bag back, and, in the first manifestation of a deep wrath bubbling under the surface, pushes him up against a wall (42). The episode of the rosary is our first glimpse into Manon’s charged relationship to her religion. The lustfulness hinted at in her corporeal relation to the rosary becomes overt when she describes her erotic interaction with the body of Jesus on the crucifix. In another literalization of the word made flesh, Manon admits,

“J’ai passé longtemps les mains sur le corps de Notre-Seigneur qui a tant souffert pour nous autres… pis tout d’un coup... (Silence.) J’ai senti comme un besoin... j’ai senti un besoin effrayant de l’embrasser... (Silence.) J’comprenais pas...” (43).103 The ‘need’ that Manon

‘doesn’t understand’ is, of course, sexual desire, which here becomes conflated with the suffering of Christ on the cross. She passes her hands over him like a lover, wanting simultaneously to assuage his wounds and her own need to connect physically with another being. Later, Manon likens the feeling she gets from caressing the statue of Jesus to that elicited by a ‘dirty’ dream she has in which she is fondled by another woman (51). Manon recognizes that her zeal for the body of Christ is not entirely chaste, but, unsure what to do about her feelings, she is by turns defiant and remorseful.

David rightly contrasts the orientation of the two characters’ speeches, pointing out that

“Manon monologue vers le dehors – sa folie est excentrique—pendant que Sandra monologue

101 God wanted me to sacrifice my beautiful rosary, so beautiful, that cost me so much, to help him save the sins of the world” (19). 102 The story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22.1-22.19) will reappear in Louise Bouchard’s Les Images. 103 “For a long time, I held my hands on the body of Our Lord who suffered so much for us... when all of a sudden... Silence. I felt this need... I felt this terrible need to kiss him... Silence. I couldn’t understand (21).

111 vers le dedans – son désir est narcissique” (1993: 156).104 To be even more precise, Manon’s confession is oriented towards two very different interlocutors – at times she is clearly speaking to God, whom she addresses using the formal vous, as in her implorations cited above. For the majority of the play, however, Manon directs her speech towards the viewer. Her opening line, in which she avers the beneficence of God, must be construed as being directed at a human interlocutor, namely the audience member, towards whom she addresses her speech throughout.

The story about the coveted rosary and its sacrifice, the erotic encounter with the body of Christ, and the bad dreams, are all directed at the audience. Manon’s confession obviously engages with the conventions of Christian confession (rather than the Greek) but it is an infelicitous confession. For the majority of the play, it is directed at the wrong interlocutor (thus violating

Austin’s postulate A.2),105 as the audience does not possess the authority to absolve the confessant. Then, when finally Manon begins apostrophising God himself, obviously vested with greater power, she violates postulate B.1, that “the procedure [...] be executed by all participants

[...] correctly” (Austin, 1990 [1962]: 14), by castigating God rather than asking pardon. Notably absent from the whole undertaking is a priest, whose function as intercessor is crucial in guaranteeing the felicity of a Christian confession. Over the course of her narrative, Manon attempts to explain her actions to us, seemingly because she has nobody else to tell. Her words suggest two competing desires: her need to justify herself as well as to express the unshakable guilt that accompanies sin. In her stories, Manon is always the victim of circumstances outside of her control, and never the agent of sin. In her coveting of the rosary, she “[a] frôlé le péché de pas mal proche” but has never crossed the line (32); her erotic encounter with the statue of Christ

104 “Manon monologues toward the external – her madness is ex-centric—while Sandra monologues toward the internal – her desire is narcissistic.” 105 This postulate stipulates that “the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked” (Austin [1962] 1990: 14-15).

112 is a “besoin” [need] that she “comprenais pas” [didn’t understand] (43); the dreams are bad because “c’est des affaires qu’on peut pas contrôler” (49)106 and are sent by a potentially malicious deity (53). For a religious confession to be felicitous, one must necessarily claim responsibility for one’s actions. Manon clearly knows these rules and has internalized them, but is overwhelmed by the need, above all else, to be understood when her desires seemingly contradict religious doctrine.

Viewed in this light, Manon’s assertion that “La solution à toute… c’est le bon Dieu”

(27) is tinged with a deep irony. Even her most putatively devotional acts are morally dubious, not to mention her various overt transgressions. When Manon begins to apostrophise God, one would expect her discourse to assume the appropriate reverence, and her confession to take on a more self-recriminatory tone. Instead, Manon launches into a series of accusations:

(Silence.) (Elle hurle.) Pourquoi vous m’avez faite ça! Pourquoi vous m’en envoyez tant dans une même journée! Pourquoi vous remettez sur mon chemin c’te p’tit gars-là que j’aimais tant pis qui a suivi sa cousine folle dans son enfer! Pourquoi vous m’avez pas envoyé un rêve rempli de votre présence plutôt que celle de l’autre! (52)107

She begins blaming God for the failures in her life, such as her decision not to become a nun because of a divine instruction that she should remain at home: “Vous m’avez dit vous-même en dedans de moé, vous m’avez doucement mais fermement murmuré à l’oreille que ma place était pas là-bas, mais icitte! À la place de ma mère, dans la chaise berçante de ma mère, dans le lit de

106 something you can’t control” (26). 107 “Silence. She screams. Why have You done this to me? Why so much in one day? Why do You put him back on my path, that little boy I loved so much and who’s followed his sick cousin into hell! Why didn’t You send me a dream filled with Your presence instead of that other one?” (30).

113 ma mère...” (57).108 Later, she remonstrates God for failing to solve her problems, insisting that

“C’est toujours vous qui a faite les choix, continuez! C’est toujours vous qui a pris ma destinée en mains ben je vous le dis une fois pour toutes : c’est votre responsabilité!” (59).109 Her anger bubbles over into outright challenge: “J’ai droit à mes jouissances!”110 she yells as she begins to give God ultimatums (58-59). Usmiani rightly observes that “[h]er assertion of her right to be loved represents a complete reversal of the traditional position of mystical literature, where it is

God, not the soul, who makes the demand” (143). This reversal is confirmed when she instructs

God, “[v]’nez plus proche, pis j’vas toute vous pardonner” (59).111 Like Offred, Manon claims the power to forgive as her own; in this case, the reversal of the hierarchy is even more extreme given that she places herself in the role of God. However, Manon cannot hold on to this radical position: in contrast to this moment of self-assertion, Manon’s anger is also punctuated by the more standard implorations, “Pardonnez-moé” “Reprenez-moé” Excusez-moé” (53)112 and

“Aidez-moé à renier mon corps!” (65).113 A good Catholic, Manon has so deeply internalized the catalogue of sins, foreomost among which is her carnal lust. These moments of appeal to God to be pardoned, excused, and readmitted into the community of the faithful nevertheless fall flat within the context of her general program of divine excoriation, resulting in a confession that is, in a word, infelicitous. Her unstable oscillation between accusation and contrition emblematizes the breakdown of Christianity as a viable ordering system for her life as she is overwhelmed by

108 “You told me Yourself, inside me. You softly, but firmly murmured in my ear that my place wasn’t there, but here. In my mother’s bed, in my mother’s life...” (34). [This is Van Burek’s translation; a more faithful rendering of this last line is “In my mother’s place, in my mother’s rocking chair, in my mother’s bed...”] 109 “It was always You who made the decisions, don’t stop now. It was always You who took my fate in Your hands, so I’ll tell you once and for all, it’s Your responsibility!” (36). 110 “I have a right to my pleasures!” (35). 111 “come closer and I’ll forgive you for everything” (36). 112 “Forgive me”; “Take me back”; [“Excuse me”] [Van Burek does not translate the last phrase] (31). 113 “Help me deny my body!” (42).

114 bodily urges and metaphysical doubts. Manon’s personal breakdown is of course the microcosm of a dynamic Tremblay is trying to expose within Québécois culture more broadly, namely the existential abyss opened up by the waning of the Church’s hegemony.

Sandra, by contrast, exists in a different relationship to the collapse of the Christian metanarrative and its attendant social values. Although her entire being is geared toward rejecting these values, she has not yet been able to articulate a mode of existence in the world that can furnish her with existential fulfilment. As a substitute, she turns to the immediate gratification of the flesh through sexuality. Whereas Manon struggles to suppress her bodily urges, Sandra indulges them with what can only be called religious fervour. Jacques Cardinal describes her as “[p]rofanation, agression de la Sainte-Mère”: “L’imaginaire catholique du corps glorieux, de l’exaltation baroque de la chair, se trouve par la même mis à contribution pour retraduire un discours religieux identifié davantage à la modification et au dénigrement de la chair” (2010: 172).114 Sandra’s idiosyncratic, parodic discourse uses religious terms to describe sexual experiences, producing the inverse of Manon’s sexualized religion. Her “[c]haritable, active et efficace”115 penis is personified as an obedient boy-scout (37); wittily, she dubs herself

“l’Immenculée Conception,”116 continuing the bawdy metaphor with the assertion that “c’est à soir que le Moineau Noir de l’Esprit Saint va venir me visiter… pour m’apporter la Grande

Nouvelle!” (56)117; she dreams of turning her lover into a “phare sur mon balcon pour montrer le

114 “a profanation of, an assault on the Holy Mother”: “The Catholic imaginary of the glorious body, of the baroque exaltation of the flesh, serves in this instance to retranslate a religious discourse identified more with the modification and denigration of the flesh.” 115 The English translation inexplicably omits this line, which can be translated, “Charitable, active and effective!” 116 This is a porte-manteau word combining “immaculate” and “ass-fucked”; Van Burek translates it, creatively, as “Immaculate Cuntception” (33). 117 “it’s tonight the Black Sparrow of the Holy Ghost will pay me a little visit... to bring me the Big News” (33).

115 chemin du ciel aux pèlerins du cul” (48).118 Sandra’s play with opposites occurs within her general programme of living life “à l’envers” (38)119: a transvestite, her biological reality is at odds with her gender identification. Within her own confession, Sandra yokes religious imagery into the service of her sexual project.

Although her lifestyle is transgressive by conservative standards, Sandra, like Manon, is trapped in an apartment across the street from where she grew up, still shocking the same people in the same way : “J’vas continuer mon numéro,” she announces, “perpétuer mon rôle de travesti drôle pour les voisines qui doivent déjà m’attendre en se demandant que c’est que j’vas leur sortir aujourd’hui” (60).120 Nothing changes on the Rue Fabre, Sandra elaborates. “Pantoute. La bonne moitié de mes amis d’enfance, les filles surtout, sont restés icitte, se sont mariés icitte pis ont faite des enfants qui nous ressemblent” (61).121

Sandra attempts to overcome this stasis by rejecting conventional religion and morality, thus becoming, to an extent, her own creator. Whereas Manon is quick to attribute her destiny to

God, Sandra consistently makes reference to herself as a quasi-divine figure, vested with the powers to transform herself and others. Part of this transformation involves overcoming biological determinism. When she searches for the ‘true self’ that lies beneath her makeup,

Sandra is incapable of finding it:

J’me sus garrochée devant mon miroir, j’me sus déshabillée au complet pis j’me sus toute beurré la face de démaquillant... J’ai frotté, j’ai frotté, j’pense que j’ai usé deux boîtes de Kleenex format familial. J’ai toute effacé mon visage comme faut. J’ai tiré

118 “A beacon on my balcony, lighting the way to heaven for all the pilgrims in search of a fuck” (25). 119 “upside down” (16). 120 “I’ll keep doing my number, perpetuate my role of comic transvestite for all the neighbours who must already be waiting for me, wondering what I’ll come up with today” (37). 121 “Not at all. At least half my childhood friends, especially the girls, have stayed here, married here and had kids that look like us” (38).

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mes cheveux par en arrière avec un élastique. (Silence.) J’ai l’honneur de déclarer officiellement qu’y reste pus aucune trace de l’homme que j’ai été. Rien! J’ai eu beau chercher, fouiller, scruter... j’me sus pas trouvé. Mon visage à moé existe pus. Y’a complètement disparu sous les tonnes de maquillage que j’y ai faite subir [...] (53)122

Sandra’s language is almost archeological: verbs such as ‘se déshabiller’ [to undress], ‘frotter’

[to rub], ‘effacer’ [to erase] suggest that truth might be located under the surface, but attempts to

“chercher, fouiller, scruter” [to search, excavate, scrutinize] fail to uncover the buried artifact.

After submitting herself to this examination, Sandra is incapable of finding any originary self.

Significantly, her pronouncement of the results of this excavation is framed as a speech act, an

‘official declaration’ by which she establishes the death of her biological self. In the place of the man she was formerly, Sandra now tells us that “[l]es cent autres visages de femmes que j’ai composés, que j’ai créés moi-même me ressemblent plus que ce qui reste de moi en-dessous”

(54).123 This divine power extends beyond herself in her assertion that she is going to mummify her lovers, transform them into objects for her pleasure (47). Her discussion of writing “Ma

Bible à moé” on Christian’s body (46) confirms Sandra’s desire to be the autonomous creator of her own private religion. It also serves as a counterpoint to Manon’s assertion that she is always attempting to decipher God’s hidden signs. Sandra, by way of contrast, is the author of her own erotic language, the only reader capable of deciphering the hermetic vocabulary scrawled in green lipstick. Her confession reverses essentially every postulate of its Christian model : in the place of the unified subject, Sandra offers a perpetually shifting series of masks designed

122 “I ran to my mirror, took off all my clothes and slopped my puss with make-up remover... I scrubbed and scrubbed, I think I used up two boxes of Kleenex, Man Size. I wiped my face completely away. I pulled my hair back with an elastic. Silence. I have the honour to officially declare that of the man I was not a single trace remains. Nothing! However much I looked, dug, examined... I could not find myself. My own face has ceased to exist. Completely vanished beneath the tons of make-up to which I have subjected it” (31). 123 “The hundred other faces of women that I’ve drawn, that I’ve created myself, look more like me than what’s left underneath” (31).

117 expressly to “attirer dans mille pièges sans noms les mille victimes convoitées par ma queue aux appétits voraces et aux instincts féroces” (54).124 Instead of guilt and shame, her monologue suggests pride in her industrious self-fashioning. The idea of truth is subjugated to the reigning power of ‘le cul’. The desire to be readmitted into a community takes the form first of disdain for the narrow-mindedness of the Rue Fabre’s inhabitants, then as her subsequent plea to be lifted out of her circumstances altogether.

This plea, addressed to Manon, marks the point at which the two characters, previously parallel but separate, come together. Both arrive at the self-abnegating realization that they have been created. Manon and Sandra both ultimately contradict their opening thesis: Manon’s professed faith in God is undermined by her admission that she has been “inventée... par...

Michel” (65).125 Sandra’s commitment to the way of the flesh is shaken by her desire to be taken up with Manon, whom she implores, “Amène moé avec toé parce que moé non plus j’existe pas!

Moé aussi j’ai été inventée!” (66).126 For Filion, at the play’s end, “[l]e créateur reprend en main ses créatures, leur parole redevient sa parole, et les deux s’envolent dans sa lumière” (Filion,

1977: 20).127 However, while he, like most scholars, understands “Michel” as referring to the playwright himself, it is provocative to consider the possibility that Manon refers to her childhood friend, the former identity of Sandra. Manon blames Michel’s downfall on the influence of his deviant cousin Thérèse,128 the woman who comes to her in her erotic dream.

124 “lure into a thousand nameless traps the thousands of victims my cock is lusting after with his appetites voracious and his instincts ferocious” (32). 125 “invented...by...Michel” (43). 126 “Take me with you, because I don’t exist either! I, too, have been invented!” (43). 127 “The creator takes his creatures back in hand, their speech becomes his own speech once more, and the two fly off in his light.” 128 Although in the first edition of the play this character is known as Hélène, in the second edition, Tremblay changed it to Thérèse, likely to distance this character from her autobiographical avatar, Tremblay’s eponymous

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“On les haïssait assez, toute la gang!” she tells us; “Excepté Michel. Je l’aimais tellement,

Michel” (50).129 This is the closest Manon comes to admitting that she has feelings for another human being, romantic or otherwise. It is thus possible to posit that she has been ‘invented’ by him in sense that he was the first to awaken within her feelings of love, attachment, sexual desire

– namely the passions she has been deflecting into her religious fervour. Sandra confirms that

Manon is her “jumelle” and that “Si Manon avait pas existé, je l’aurais inventée” (63).130 The sexual dimension is certainly connoted in Sandra’s assertion that she gave her “toute la passion dont j’étais capable” (62).131 In a sense, the two characters have invented each other: Manon knows, deep down, that her moment of childhood connectedness is somehow more meaningful than all her subsequent years of pious self-denial. Sandra, by the same token, tells us that she depends on Manon for a surprising reason – to reassure her that genuine happiness is possible:

“J’ai trouvé quelqu’un de vraiment heureux à regarder vivre sa petite vie heureuse de souris heureuse au milieu du décor de mon enfance heureuse. Pis ça me rassure (63).132 Manon’s imputed happiness, a word Sandra reiterates for emphasis, is the happiness of a mouse, quietly leading its unassuming life amidst the “decor of [Sandra’s] own happy childhood.” Sandra finds this life “reassuring” because it provides the stability and permanence that are absent from

Sandra’s perpetual self-redefinition.

cousin. According to Jean-Marc Barrette’s L’univers de Michel Tremblay, “[p]lusieurs éléments de sa personnalité rappellent le personnage de Thérèse” (1996: 274). This change is obviously an important indicator of Tremblay’s self-conscious movement away from pure autobiography. While my discussion of Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra relies largely on the first edition text, I am respecting scholarly convention by using the updated name. 129 “We hated them all, the whole gang! Except Michel. I loved Michel” (27). 130 “twin”; “If Manon had not existed, I would have invented her” (41). 131 “all the passion I possibly could” (40). 132 “I have found someone truly happy whom I can watch live her happy, mouse-like life, surrounded by the decor of my own happy childhood. And I am reassured” (41).

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The irony here is of course that Manon is far from happy; Sandra’s version of the little self-satisfied mouse is but a variation on the ‘grass is always greener’ fallacy. The fact that a personality as outlandish as she finds reassurance in the humble life of a woman like Manon suggests that her mode of being is, to a great extent, reactionary: her “performatively enacted” identity, the “parodic proliferation and subversive play of gendered meanings” (Butler, 2008

[1990]: 46) is only possible within a discursive framework where Manon functions as the norm.

Both Sandra’s gender identity as well as her use of parodically inverted religious discourse are, in essence, constructed as a reaction against Manon. Sandra’s account of her counterpart is necessarily reductionist, suggesting that she really has ‘invented’ her while simultaneously being

‘invented’ by her. In the final analysis, the two are suffering in different ways from a similar crisis of identity.

The play’s ending confirms their speech acts as infelicitous confessions by denying the idea of truth, the possibility of redemption, and the existence of an omnipotent deity. Although

Manon represents the quest for “an absolute” (Usmiani, 1982: 26), the play thematizes the futility of such human desires; Usmiani calls this realization “the real tragedy in the work of

Michel Tremblay” (1982: 26). The ending also reinforces the play’s social critique by underscoring the futility of its characters’ lives, particularly Manon’s, squandered in the service of a religion that proves groundless. The fact that Manon inherited this destiny from her mother speaks to the way repression is internalized within a society and passed on from one generation to the next. For her mother, Marie-Louise of À toi pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou, sex is the property of “les animaux” and “les putains de la Main” (85).133 Sandra’s rabid sexuality,

133 “animals” and “the whores on the Main” (68).

120 expressed in inverted religious terms, can likewise be regarded as a product of this extreme repression.

The play’s final tableau, in its refusal to grant either closure or definitive meaning, represents the most overt challenge to Christian teleology. Consider, by way of contrast, the conversion scene from Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine is at a similar existential impasse, having dabbled in both the ways of the flesh as well as the search for true faith: as he puts it,

“[t]his debate in my heart was a struggle of myself against myself” (VIII.xi.27). Unable to find satisfaction in either, Augustine arrives at a point of crisis: “From a hidden depth a profound self-examination had dredged up a heap of all my misery and ‘set it in the sight of my heart’”

(VIII.xii.28). When Augustine prays for and receives enlightenment, as described in the tolle lege scenario discussed in the previous chapter, he describes feeling “as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled” (VIII.xii.29). The final moments of Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra parody the Christian ideal of divine illumination. This doctrine, “most closely associated with Augustine and his scholastic followers,” maintains “that human beings require a special divine assistance in their ordinary cognitive activities” (Pasnau, 2011). Whereas Augustine describes a successful moment of religious inspiration, the play’s final scene uses a religious visual vocabulary to depict precisely the opposite. The wash of bright stage lighting in which the two characters are engulfed is the secular counterpoint to Augustine’s “light of relief,” following as it does their admissions that they have been invented by a playwright. This admission and the bright light that follow represent the breakdown of metanarratives that claim to explain the being of the subject: Manon has devoted her life to religion, whereas Sandra has pursued the way of the flesh. Both end up dissatisfied as their chosen paths lead to existential dead ends, Manon proving unable to resist the desires of her body and Sandra no longer capable of denying the “anger and disappointment”

121 that accompany the inevitable truth that, for her various lovers, “at bottom she is nothing for them but a ‘one, two, or three star fuck’” (Usmiani, 1982: 142). Augustine’s conversion must be read within a teleological framework of movement towards religious enlightenment, a logic shared by the standard confession in its progress from sin to redemption. Here, there is no possibility of redemption, only a “return to the crucible of the author’s imagination whence they came, both of them testifying in their own way to that ‘eternal hunger which shall never more be satisfied’” (Usmiani, 1982: 145). Tremblay’s characters will find no higher truth: Manon asks to be swept up in God’s light but instead is transported away by her more prosaic creator with

Sandra in tow.

Conclusion

Both The Handmaid’s Tale and Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra serve simultaneously diagnostic and normative functions. That is, they both diagnose the problems with society at the same time as they imagine possible avenues for its amelioration. Atwood’s folder of pessimistic newspaper clippings, which provided inspiration for the novel, are the basis for its critique: topically, the novel takes aim at forms of patriarchal power disguised as religious observance. It asks us to extend this logic beyond religion to other forms of social organization that subordinate the rights of one specific group to the service of a higher good. Although the novel was written almost thirty years ago, its resonance continues to be felt: in recent history, Guantanamo Bay has been the illustration par excellence of the institutionalized violation of human rights. To this grim picture of individuals in bondage, however, Atwood offers possible correctives, such as confession as a form of witnessing. In this capacity, Offred’s narrative has something in common with the testimony heard under the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of countries with a history of institutionalized discrimination, such as South Africa and, of course, Canada. What

122 elevates the novel beyond simple didacticism, however, is its structural enactment of its politics.

Offred’s narrative is destabilized by its own inherent lacunae, rewritings and deliberate fictionalizations, on the one hand, and on the other by its metatextual subversion when it is revealed as the reconstitution of a smug male academic. Atwood therefore shows without telling us that any narrative can become coopted and reinscribed within the dominant discourse. It is our job as readers and critics ever to be mindful of the construction of narrative, whether the stories we read in the newspaper or the grand narratives our culture embraces as its moral fundament.

Similarly, Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra operates simultaneously on the diagnostic and normative fronts. Manon and Sandra are classic, if opposite, examples of the effects of social conservatism: Manon capitulates, Sandra rebels. By the end of the play, it has become clear that neither approach leads to the existential fulfilment the characters are seeking. At the very least, the play suggests that the only way to live ‘in good faith’, as Sartre would put it, is to seek “un style à moé.”134 Usmiani rightly identifies Carmen as the only character who succeeds in doing so, if only briefly, before she is murdered and canonized by a society torn between upholding the status quo and moving into a new era of self-actualization. Tremblay’s decision to write in joual exposed the prejudice of those who felt that blue-collar Montreal, and specifically its women, were, thematically and linguistically, unrepresentable on the stage.

That a work whose primary target is the Church would be structured as a confession is particularly ironic. Over the course of the play, however, Tremblay ingeniously dismantles the tenets of confession one by one, with the ultimate subversion occurring at the play’s end in the

134 Sartre develops the concept of “good faith,” which he distinguishes from “bad faith,” in L’Être et le néant (translated as Being and Nothingness [1943]). As Greg Dimitriadis summarizes, the term “bad faith” refers to “all the ways we refuse our basic, human freedoms through recourse to static ideas, beliefs, and roles” (2009:4). To act in good faith, by contrast, is to act in keeping with one’s principles, refusing to rehearse social scripts for the sake of conformism or convenience. For Dimitriadis, Guantanamo Bay represents the “qunitessential gesture of bad faith” (2009: 8).

123 metatextual usurpation of God’s place. The curtain is pulled back, so to speak, on the myth of divine preordination, revealing the artist at the heart of the machine. Rather than ruminate pessimistically on the death of God, however, Tremblay suggests that the only path to existential fulfilment is to develop one’s own unique voice, in opposition to those who would insist that one parrot the official discourse. Ultimately, this is the message that unites The Handmaid’s Tale and

Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra: “un style à moé” isn’t just an idiosyncratic way of expressing oneself, but rather, the only way for the subject to resist capitulating to the oppressive metanarratives that would otherwise keep her in check.

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Chapter 3 The Sacred and the Mundane: bpNichol’s The Martyrology and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Introduction to Chapter 3

Whereas the previous chapter focused on two texts that target religion as that basis for social critique, this chapter will consider two texts that treat religious discourse with sincerity. The confessional praxis of both bpNichol and Elizabeth Smart involves the dismantling of repressive social and aesthetic morays; however, what distinguishes their works from those of Atwood and

Tremblay is that, for them, religion is viewed not as the locus of normativity but rather as the repository of the transcendent or sacred. Both writers develop a unique vocabulary that borrows heavily from Biblical sources. As the title of his work indicates, Nichol is particularly indebted to religion; in addition to the martyrology, he likewise includes prayers, hymns, and other formal addresses to the divine. This is not to say that Nichol wholeheartedly appropriates or endorses

Christianity as a viable ordering system. Rather, the Biblical lexicon is one of many tools by which Nichol attempts to get beyond entrenched modes of thinking to arrive at new insights.

Although the text announces itself as Martyrology, I will endeavour to show that it is primarily a work of confession, in both the religious and the literary senses. Its deconstruction of the assumptions that normally underwrite both of these forms occasions the articulation of a different kind of modern subjectivity, untethered from the stability of the univocal “I.” This same destabilization characterizes what I call Nichol’s ‘quasi-theological’ worldview: in the wake of

God’s death, Nichol departs from the trajectory of other late twentieth-century writers by attempting to develop a viable theological alternative than nonetheless incorporates

125 fragmentation. His poetic praxis, I conclude, demonstrates the commensurability of postmodernism and religion.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept also relies heavily on Biblical sources, specifically its main intertext, The Song of Solomon. The narrator frames her love affair with a married man in larger-than-life terms, aligning herself with characters and scenarios drawn from the Bible and other epic sources. She strategically erases her proverbial scarlet letter by recasting herself as a prophet of love, a tragic heroine, and the victim of cruel fate. While she does critique the norms that condemn her love, religion functions not as target but rather as tool in her denunciation of wrong-minded morays. The narrator subtly builds her case through a variety of speech acts which function to justify her actions; in this chapter, I rely on Shoshana Felman’s concept of narrative ‘seduction’ to describe how her confessional speech is designed to indoctrinate the reader into an alternative reality, where beauty and love trump conventional moral scruples. Unlike in the previous chapter, where religion was associated with dominant power, the two writers considered here look to religion as the locus of magic, heroism, and the transcendence of terrestrial convention.

The Martyrology: Introduction

When bpNichol began The Martyrology in 1967, he had no idea that his project would take on the epic proportions of a nine-volume series that was still ongoing at the time of his early death twenty-one years later. Although Nichol himself has described it as “an open-ended long poem”

(McCaffery, 1988: 79), the label must be regarded as a very approximate descriptor for a work whose content varies widely from one volume to the next, culminating in a series of musical scores meant to be performed orally. The difficulty of classifying the work within any one genre attests to Nichol’s abhorrence of “the idea of being fixed in a formulated phrase” (Billingham,

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2000: 10). It also speaks to Nichol’s receptivity to a wide spectrum of artistic and cultural influences, “none of which,” Irene Niechoda argues, “is included in the line of English literature institutionalized in Canada.” Her examples include “mythologies of the Middle East, North

American (and other) aboriginal cosmologies, Druidic runic systems[…], the bardic tradition in ancient Britain, Chinese poetry, Japanese forms […], European Dada, science fiction, contemporary writing in English, and comic strips” (Niechoda, 1992: 10-11). For an avant-garde writer, subversion of the canon can be an end in itself; however, Nichol’s formal experimentation was not only meant to challenge convention, but had the additional goal of attempting to find

“order in a chaotic world” (Billingham, 2000: 16). Susan Billingham has suggested that the poem be regarded as “a descendent of the epic tradition,” “a cultural repository” (2000:15) that seeks, like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, to reconnect the fragments of a culture no longer unified by a shared belief in divine omnipotence. For many so-called postmodern writers, the collapse of

Christianity as a structuring metanarrative signals the futility of the search for ordering principles. It might come as somewhat of a surprise for those of us accustomed to the secular strand of postmodernism that Nichol explicitly aligns his practice with religion, stating that his writing aspires to the same kind of illumination “I was reaching for as a kid in my religious experience” (Nichol, 1988: 235). He explains, “I began to become more conscious that I had a belief, in essence, in the sacredness of the activity of language—not in the particular language necessarily […], but the activity itself” (Nichol, 1988: 234). This idea of language as an active force rather than a fixed structure informs all aspects of the poem; at the same time, the poet grounds his formal and semantic experimentation within the context of a martyrology, situating the text within the discourse of religion.

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The function of poetry as a religious gesture of this kind is explicated in Book 3, where

Nichol refers to poetic praxis as “this act this moment of confession or prayer” (3).135 The poet’s acquaintance with religious discourse can to a limited extent be traced back to his upbringing.136 Raised a Presbyterian, Nichol was familiar with the concept of reaching out to the divine through prayer. However, as the second section of this chapter will demonstrate, Nichol’s address is directed not at the Christian God per se, but at a variably-signified deity whose traces he finds in a wide range of historical and cultural sources. In addition to these, the poet mines his own experience, complementing the religious confession with its secular analogue, the confessional life narrative. In the first section of this chapter, I will show how Nichol’s deconstructive approach to autobiographical elements distinguishes his practice from that of the mid twentieth-century Confessional poets, who legitimized the use of self-disclosure in poetry.

As the invention of a fictive hagiography attests, The Martyrology’s destabilization of generic norms is, to an extent, consistent with the playful irony that characterizes postmodern literature.

Of greater significance, however, is the poet’s sincerity in his desire to contact the sacred through poetry. This sincerity characterizes a use of confession that otherwise breaks with convention: under Nichol’s pen, the unified subject is fractured into many shards as the “I” comes under fire; truth takes a back seat to story; guilt and shame are displaced as motivators of confession, and the desire to be readmitted into the community is figured instead as an affirmation of community. Far from the Foucauldian paradigm of confession as an instrument of

135 As the pages of The Martyrology are not numbered and the text arranged in a spatial rather than linear configuration, it is difficult to provide specific references. The numbers in parentheses refer to the volume, or “book.” Book 6 is divided into sections, some of which are in turn subdivided again; where this is the case I have indicated the specific section using decimal places (e.g. 6.2.1). 136 Nichol comments that he spent “lots of time in the United Church because there weren’t that many Presbyterian churches around” (Nichol, 1988: 235). He adds, “I always admired my father’s relationship to God, which was: he was totally scared shitless of Him” (Nichol, 1988: 235).

128 power, Nichol shows that confessing oneself can serve as an attempt to transcend human institutions altogether.

The Poem as Journal and the Confessional Poets all of this the personal references the names nothing more than shrill chatter noise reaching some day a final destination unintelligible vocabulary history (6.2.17)

In our culture, according to Foucault, confession is “une des techniques les plus hautement valorisées pour produire le vrai” (Foucault, 1976: 79).137 It functions as a pseudo-scientific discourse by means of which one alchemically commutes a subjective inner experience into an external, objective truth. This is particularly evident in the legal context, where the framing of a statement as a confession imparts to it a “special stamp of authenticity” that can have dramatic repercussions for the speaker (Brooks, 2000: 9). As Margaret Atwood and Michel Tremblay demonstrate, however, confession can also be used as a praxis of resistance to dominant powers.

In The Martyrology, Nichol works against Foucault’s understanding of confession by troubling the discourse of truth and authenticity through generic and narrative destabilization, an idiosyncratic blending of fact and fiction, deconstructive play with language and the fracturing of the unified subject.

137 “one of the [...] most highly valued techniques for producing truth” (1978 [1990]: 59).

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Generically, both The Martyrology and By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept are indebted to the journal form, an “open-ended structure written in the present tense, in which the author records the details of daily events as they occur” (Felski, 1989: 96). Journal entries are often dated, as Françoise Van Roey-Roux notes (1983: 24), which lends a kind of immediacy to the writing; this, as Barbara Havercroft signals, is one feature that distinguishes the journal from the autobiography, “où la visée rétrospective est nettement plus grande et manifestement avouée”

(1996: 24).138 Significantly, both writers retrospectively attempted to distance themselves from this form: although many of the passages that appear in By Grand Central Station are lifted directly from Smart’s personal diaries, the author maintained that the [novel’s] love story is

“archetypal” rather than autobiographical (qtd. in Sullivan, 1991: 153). Nichol, likewise, ultimately rejected the labelling of his Martyrology as a poetic journal, conceding that “the term did inform the composition of The Martyrology for a number for years...even tho, in the final analysis,... [I] was not writing a poetic journal” (Billingham, 2000: 142). In spite of Nichol’s disavowal, the poem’s open structure, its inclusion of referential proper names, its attention to the passage of time and the repeated mention of diaries occasion a certain scholarly skepticism.

In Book 5, for instance, Nichol goes as far as to include his age at the time of composition and revision, inviting us to “picture a man (31) narrating this poem/ picture a man (36) typing this final draft.”139 The names of real friends are peppered throughout The Martyrology’s volumes: a trip to “cape split” features “fran & tom & charles & barb &/ the three of us” followed by the poet’s characterization of “this poem” as “the diary of a journey” (2). This same sense of the

138 “where the retrospective scope is greater and openly admitted.” 139 The inclusion of empirical details such as the poet’s age appears frequently in the writing of the Confessional poets. In the poem “Home After Three Months Away,” for example, Robert Lowell writes, “Though I am forty-one/ not forty now, the time I put away/ was child’s play” (1959: 97). Likewise, Anne Sexton begins “The Double Image” with the statement, “I am thirty this November” (1960: 53). Sylvia Plath is “only thirty” in “Lady Lazarus” (1965: 6).

130 poem as ‘diary of a journey’ is evoked in the empirically precise chronicles of the narrator’s travels around the country: in Book 3 we encounter him “driving east again/ metropolitan toronto population 1,916,000, [...] watching the concrete walls of the QEW.” The journal structure is perhaps most overtly manifest in Book 6, the second section of which, “A Book of Hours,” is subdivided into the hours of the day, with their “collections of random thots or/meditations”

(6.2.1). Thus, in the words of one critic, “[t]he fact that Nichol eventually came to minimize The

Martyrology’s journal status does not render the term inaccurate (Billingham, 2000: 142). Critics have generally preferred this generic designation to the discourse of autobiography; ‘journal,’ crucially, still suggests the presence of biographical content without setting up the expectation of narrative closure. Shirley Neuman distinguishes the two forms of literary endeavour on the grounds that whereas

an autobiographer attempts to find significant patterns in her life and to tease meaning out of them, the journal writer cannot necessarily perceive such patterns, let alone assign a fixed meaning to them, for they remain incomplete, […] caught up in and shaped by the different events and the shifting discourses that daily create the changing journal-writer. (1988: 57)

While conceding that the poem “flirts with the genre of autobiography,” Smaro Kamboureli provides another argument against classifying the poem within that genre: she maintains that the

“experientially real” is always “a point of departure for [The Martyrology’s] meanderings in the linguistically real” (1988: 96). According to her, the autobiographical content is subject to the same deconstruction that Nichol performs on all his material, including language itself. Neuman and Kamboureli thus make two important observations regarding Nichol’s pseudo- autobiographical practice: on the one hand, that the time of writing is contemporaneous with the

131 events described, and on the other, that the events themselves function primarily as pretexts for language play.

Kamboureli is, to a great extent, correct in her assessment. Nevertheless, in spite of the critical discomfort with the discourse of autobiography as well as the poet’s own disavowal, the sustained presence of real biographical detail demands critical commentary. As Steven Scobie notes, the prevalence of this self-referential content increases with each subsequent volume, where “Nichol’s account of [his] community, especially of his own family, becomes more explicit, more directly ‘confessional’” (Scobie, 1984: 125). In his infusion of the personal into the poetic, Nichol reveals a profound if unconscious debt to the American school of Confessional poets that included Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and their contemporaries. Writing in the 1950s and 60s, the Confessional poets reacted against the modernist value of impersonality in poetry championed by writers such as T.S. Eliot, articulating instead “an insistently autobiographical first person engaged in resistance to the pressure to conform” (Middlebrook,

1993: 635). Through the process of “painful truth-telling” (Middlebrook, 1993: 640), they exposed details from their private lives in order to signal their nonconformism with social expectations. By thematizing madness, depression, domestic instability, and other social taboos, the Confessional poets pushed the boundaries of poetic expression, dispelling illusions of the happy American ensconced in the sheltered, nuclear home. Unglamorous images of parenthood abound in their work: Sylvia Plath describes herself as “cow-heavy and floral/ In my Victorian nightgown” (1965: 1). Robert Lowell has “a nine months’ daughter,/ young enough to be my granddaughter” (1959: 99). Suicide is another common theme: Plath’s repeated attempts to kill herself are directly referenced in “Lady Lazarus”: “I am only thirty./And like the cat I have nine times to die./ This is Number Three” (1965: 6). The speaker of Anne Sexton’s “The Double

Image” likewise “chose two times/ to kill myself”; even more shockingly, she addresses the

132 account of her suicide attempt to her four-year old child: “Death was simpler than I’d thought./

The day life made you well and whole/ I let the witches take away my guilty soul./ I pretended I was dead/ until the white men pumped the poison out” (1960: 53). These examples reveal two characteristic features of Confessional poetry: the use of the first-person pronoun, corresponding to a real, extratextual poet, and the revelation of extremely personal autobiographical information.

Like the Confessional poets, Nichol offers up his deep personal anguish at the altar of poetry. In one of the most poignant passages of The Martyrology, Nichol describes the loss of his first child, who was stillborn, and his fear for his wife, Ellie:

the heart does break

the aching muscle in the chest carries more than the weight hangs from the body from the barely perceiving brain buried under the weight of loss

of grief

brief moment of clarity stillborn

i never know him never name him bury him under the greening tree in the shadow of the old stone wall [...] when our son died i feared Ellie’d die too (6.2 “The Birth/Death Cycle”)

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The inclusion of passages such as this one has compelled some scholars to excavate the poem’s autobiographical underpinnings, an undertaking that in some sense appears to be sanctioned by the poem’s use of the journal form.140 While there is certainly merit in this line of enquiry insofar as it adds to the historical record of bpNichol’s life and writing, in the context of poetic analysis, the task is as quixotic as attempting to unravel the dense network of intertexts in T.S.

Eliot’s The Waste Land. The partial list of references Eliot appended to that poem is incomplete to the point of self-negation; its insufficiency points to the near impossibility of understanding every intertextual or interlingual reference in a poem meant to embody the fragmentation of an interbellum generation. In the same vein, Nichol does not expect his reader to map every biographical reference onto a timeline of his life, but rather to encounter these references in the context of an aesthetic project.

A significant point of methodological divergence between Nichol and the Confessional poets can thus be detected in the centrality of self-disclosure to their writing. The Confessional poets, as their appellation suggests, consistently deployed the personal avowal as a challenge to poetic detachment. Nichol, by contrast, is not consistent in this regard: writing a generation later, in the wake of the autobiographical turn in poetry, his avant-garde praxis consists in the juxtaposition of real biographical elements with other, fictional passages, many of which, especially from Book 5 onward, involve the ludic deconstruction of language.141 The

140 Irene Nichoda’s A Sourcery for Books 1 and 2 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology (1992) provides a good starting point in this regard. See also Susan Billingham, Language and the Sacred in Canadian Poet bpNichol’s The Martyrology (2000). 141 The Confessional poets, it must be noted, also rely heavily on figures from mythology and literature. In addition to Ariel, Plath makes reference to Lazarus, Gulliver, Medusa, and others (1965). Lowell discusses Roman and Greek mythology (“Beyond the Alps”) and apostrophises “Fiction!” in his eponymous ode to Ford Madox Ford (1959). Anne Sexton becomes “a possessed witch” in “Her Kind” (1960: 21) and inhabits a Roman myth in “Where I Live in This Honourable House of the Laurel Tree” (1960: 24). However, the important difference is that whereas the

134 autobiographical content becomes yet another fragment in a mosaic of fragments, which Nichol prevents the reader from assembling into a coherent narrative by withholding crucial orienting details. At times, his practice is more reminiscent of Eliot’s “mythic method” than of

Confessional poetry.142 The Martyrology thus situates itself somewhere between the scholarly detachment of The Waste Land and the intensely personal engagement of Ariel.

Confessional poets use these images metaphorically, Nichol’s mythology has a certain ontological independence: the saints are not simply metaphors, but real beings created through deconstructive language play. As Nichol suggests in an interview, “I realized that these saints had, for me, taken on a meaning and a life; that is to say, they were more than merely puns” (qtd in Niechoda, 1992: 18). 142 In his essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” Eliot described the “mythic method”:

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. (1975: 177)

Nichol’s debt to Eliot is a topic that necessitates greater exploration. Unfortunately, there is insufficient space in the present study to do so, nor is it possible to provide a comprehensive account of Nichol’s dense network of allusions and references. The following passage from Book 3 provides a representative sample, moving as it does through references to Nura Nal (a DC comic book superheroine), Greek mythological figures (Io and Zeus), the Biblical flood (Noah) as well as its ancient Sumerian analogue (Utnapishtim, from the Epic of Gilgamesh):

Io of the many eyes Nura Nal's vision Io who suckled Zeus & 'invented the five vowels of the first alphabet & the consonants B & T' Nura Nal who sees thru dreams what is to transpire that arch which takes us over the present into the future arks we sail like Noah or Utnapishtim till we come to that day we are no longer young others come as Gilgamesh did (3)

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Generically speaking, then, Nichol’s use of confession must be differentiated from the intentional forms of self-disclosure evident among the Confessional poets. Plath and her contemporaries conform to Felski’s definition of confessional literature as “a type of autobiographical writing which signals its intention to foreground the most personal and intimate details of the author’s life” (1989: 83).143 For Nichol, by contrast, the “most personal and intimate details” recede into the background as the poem cannibalizes and then spits them out altered beyond recognition. The same passage that so agonizingly chronicles the speaker’s heartbreak at the loss of his first child, the “Birth/Death Cycle,” is rife with Nichol’s characteristic language play. In what McCaffery labels a “paragram,” a language game where one word or phrase is broken into alternate syntactical units and mined for homophones (1986:

63-64), Nichol considers the word “order”: “or is a door/opens/thru which the world/’s glimpsed/tumbling” (6.2.11-12). He then finds

a particular order in a wall of doors

six walls of doors hex agon y (6.2.11-12)

Although Nichol does not provide any explanation, the reader associates the “wall of doors” with the scene that directly precedes it: the ‘opened door’ through which the poet glimpses the

“tumbling” world leads to the hospital room of his wife and stillborn son. The six ordered (‘or-

143 Rita Horváth regards Confessional poetry “as a sub-genre of autobiography” (2005: 12) citing the authority of Robert Lowell, who reserved the term ‘autobiographical’ for his own work, labelling that of his students ‘confessional’ “to discredit them mildly” (Horváth, 2005: 12 n9).

136 doored’) walls of the hospital corridor are imbued with pain; thus, hex-agon-y (another paragram). In the absence of any overt explanation on the part of the author, the reader is left to make these associative leaps on her own. Confessional detail gives way to deconstructive play with language, which proves more effective than any narrative account of the process of grief: the poet performs grief rather than describing it, enacting, in the textual lacunae, the ineffable nature of pain. At the same time, as will be discussed presently, Nichol would not regard the disclosure of the word “agony” as merely a coincidence, but as a spiritual connection solidified through language.

The opacity we encounter in The Martyrology’s confessional passages is intentional: when discussing his work, Nichol went to great pains to downplay the referentiality of the

(auto)biographical content. “[T]he hardest thing about using biographical detail in the long poem,” he stated, “is getting the reader to accept it as what it is: words in a book revealing exactly the amount of information necessary for that moment of the composition” (qtd. in

Kamboureli, 1988: 100). Asked why he overtly names friends and family throughout the poem,

Nichol replied that there where three primary reasons, all of them pertaining to the aesthetics of storytelling rather than the desire for autobiographical precision: (1) “[I]n daily living we meet all sorts of people [...] about whom we learn nothing more than their name”; (2) a proper name in the text has many signifieds, “i.e. ‘David’ is never just one David but a variety of Davids encountered during the writing of the text”; (3) growing up, his family “told stories where they would mention proper names just as part of the gesture of story-telling. You never stopped to ask who these people were because it was irrelevant to the story at hand” (McCaffery, 1988: 84).

Stephen Scobie suggests that “[u]nless the reader is immediately acquainted with bpNichol’s circle of friends, the names in The Martyrology will remain just names. It is not necessary for the reader to be able to follow the complex narrative” (Scobie, 1984: 124). Scobie elaborates,

137 positing that Nichol strategically reveals just enough information to create the illusion of biographical precision without actually providing specific details. He argues that Nichol is as such able to move beyond “wallowing in the confessional details of love affairs and private neuroses” to a more “fundamental” recognition that “the quality of his being [...] is manifest in the movements of his language, the rhythms of his voice, the inflection of his speech” (Scobie,

1984: 124). The constative truth of the poet’s disclosures is secondary to the spiritual release of energy that comes through an attention to language—secondary, but not inessential, as Nichol firmly situates himself in a tradition of storytelling that roots itself in biography. Like all good storytellers, Nichol blends this source material with other fictional and mythological elements to create “a cosmology and a genealogy which substantially alter the humanistic methods that have defined the self” (Kamboureli, 1988: 96). Nichol thus inhabits the confessional mode while at the same time subverting it: he makes use of autobiographical detail but simultaneously undermines our expectation that it be tied to a coherent, teleological account of his life.

In its blending of fact and fiction, The Martyrology exhibits its kinship with another literary genre, namely the Japanese utanikki or ‘poetic diary’.144 Nichol’s interest in non-Western literary traditions brought him into contact with the utanikki, a form dating back to the 10th century characterized by the attention to private life rather than the public sphere, the inclusion of poems and poetic rumination, and, most unfamiliar to a Western audience, the intermittent fictionalization of events in the service of a greater point or moral the author is attempting to

144 Nichol refers directly to this form in Book 6:

the real rhythm is the rhythm of the hours progression of the days years you have left for your

utanikki (6.2.1)

138 convey (Miner, 1969: 4-6). To an extent, Nichol’s practice is consistent with the poetic and mimetic license offered by this form. Whereas the Western form of confessional diary, according to Rita Felski, “often shores up its claims to authenticity and truthfulness by consciously distinguishing itself from the category of literature” (Felski , 1989: 86), the Japanese model remains aware of itself as poetic artefact. The refusal to choose between “truthfulness” and

“literature” is one of the defining characteristics of Nichol’s practice. Nichol does not, however, discard the concepts of ‘authenticity’ and ‘truthfulness’ wholesale, but correlates them to the quasi-theological aim145 of his literary project rather than to autobiographical precision. To write authentically is to “rip off the mask of words to free the sounds” (1), attempting to contact the

“sacred reality to the world” (Nichol, 1988: 235).

Beyond playing fast and loose with biographical detail, Nichol’s confessional practice likewise challenges convention in its dismantling of the unified subject. Graphemically, Nichol represents the subversion of the ego through the refusal to capitalize the first person pronoun, which he consistently writes “i.” Alternative orthographies are central to the epistemological renewal the poet is undertaking, following the dictum attributed to Anthony Ellis in Book 3,

“‘you must lay down a new language, a new tongue enlightened by the spirits’” (Book 3). The poet directly addresses his method in Book 4, where he justifies his idiosyncratic spelling of the word ‘thought’ “thot”:

to rid me of the ugh in thought i spell anew weave the world

145 Nichol’s quasi-theological approach to language will be discussed further in the second section of this chapter.

139

out of the or binary (4)

Or/binary, beyond a mere pun on the expected word “ordinary” suggests Nichol’s dissatisfaction with binary, either/or thinking; his ‘both/and’ method allows for the exploration of new semantic, and by extension, spiritual, possibilities. The decapitalization of the “I” is central to this project: Kamboureli refers to the subject of Nichol’s Marytrology as an “elliptical” self, which “promises to unveil its truth, but […] continues to point away from it; it distances itself not only from the searching reader but from its own meaning as well” (Kamboureli, 1988: 96).

The “constancy of the Cartesian ego” (Kamboureli, 1997: 96) is an illusion Nichol works to dispel: in Book 4, he revisits Descartes’s famous Method of Doubt, whereby the philosopher used doubt as a method for arriving at inalienable certainties.146 Doubt is but a step along the way to Descartes’s positive establishment of the unified subject; Nichol, by contrast, regards doubting as lurking beneath the constancy of the “I,” pronoun by which we “make ourselves capitals/of earthly doubt” (4). He takes aim at the hubris of this self-assertion, stating in Book 4,

“i am wary of that impulse within me/would have it out with my i/how can i cast itself out” (4) and confirming in an interview that a central focus in The Martyrology is “an attempt to deconstruct the ‘I’” (Nichol, 1988: 236).

There are several explanations for Nichol’s desire to do away with the stable subject. The most basic of these is the diachronic fact that The Martyrology was written over two decades, during which time Nichol evolved as a person and as a poet. Just as the writer of a journal will be surprised, upon reading an old entry, to encounter a previous self, The Martyrology as journal is

146 The conclusion commonly referred to as cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, is an example of such a certainty: applying the Method of Doubt, Descartes found that it was impossible to doubt his own existence, which he thus affirmed in the Second Meditation of his Discours de la méthode (1637).

140 narrated by an ever-changing subject. Steve McCaffery has called this the “historical ‘i’,” “an ‘i’ which partakes of history & is not the same in Book 6 as it was in Book 1 precisely because it has moved on in time, knows both more and less, has been changed by being in the world and by being in the book” (1988: 85). Benveniste provides the linguistic armature for this line of reasoning in his assertion that the mutability of the ‘I’ is a phenomenon that inheres in language, but is often occluded by usage. He argues that there is no transcendental nature to the ‘I’, but only “instances of discourse” that change each time the pronoun is deployed. “Il faut donc souligner ce point,” he states: “je ne peut être identifié que par l’instance de discours qui le contient et par là seulement. Il ne vaut que dans l’instance où il est produit” (1966: 252).147

Nichol brings this latent instability to the fore, thematizing the referential instability of the ‘I’ as a means of interrogating the existential development of the individual through time.

Picking up on Benveniste’s insight, McCaffery highlights the metatextual dimension of

Nichol’s ‘i’ which knows always that it is a “product of text” (Miki, 1988: 16). Roman Jakobson, another linguist whose insights prove instructive, notes that I always has the dual nature of being both a grammatical symbol as well as in “existential relation” to its referent (1984: 43).

Generally, in a text, the symbolic aspect of the pronoun is ignored in favour of its referential function. In a deconstructive text such as Nichol’s, by contrast, the physical medium of language is indissociable from the meaning it conveys.148 Steve McCaffery thus refers to the subject of

The Martyrology as “[a] subject deprived of unity and circulating as a textual effect among the verbal fission and the shattered syntax of the language” (1988: 85). The subject as “textual

147 “It is neccessary to stress this point: I can only be identified by the instance of discourse that contains it and by that alone. It is has no value except in the instance in which it is produced” (Benveniste, 1971: 218). 148 Nichol’s interest in the material signifier is perhaps most evident in his extensive corpus of concrete poetry, important examples of which can be found in Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson’s excellent anthology The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader (2007).

141 effect” can be clearly discerned in Book 5, where Nichol draws attention to the various semantic, homophonic and visual aspects of language:

n g i c so clearly looking out across the surface of the words today the letters are not my n m e no thing is my n m e tho evil lives in various guises it’s i s i’s n m e narcissus as it was so long a go e go and maybe even i go o go s poe goed edgarrishly all’a narcisistically (5)

This passage, replete with McCaffreyan paragrams, relies heavily on the homophonic associations with letters and words, conceived of as concrete entities across whose “surface” one can gaze. Read out loud, the opening line of this passage attests to the speaker’s being able to

‘see clearly’, while the sequence of letters itself connotes the contrasting realms of practice that end in –gic such as logic or magic. The next two passages can be read according to the same rubric, which would yield ‘the letters are not my enemy/nothing is my enemy’. At the same time,

“n m e” evokes the word ‘name’, yielding ‘nothing is my name’ (a reference to Odysseus and the cyclops). Nichol then goes on to make reference to other historical and mythological figures including Isis (Egyptian goddess, patron of nature and magic), Narcissus (Greek mythological figure) Ogopogo (sea monster of British Columbian legend), the poet Edgar Allan Poe and the

Muslim God Allah. Lurking among these mythological figures, revealed by looking “out across the surface of the words,” is the “i.” Although “evil lives in various guises,” the only ‘enemy’

142 present among these threatening or foreign figures is this “i,” as suggested by a possible reading of the sixth line, ‘i is i is enemy.’ Read accordingly, “maybe even i go” becomes the only solution to the ‘narcissism’ mentioned in the last line, which Nichol connects with the ego

(“narcissus as it was so long a go/e go”). “i” is as much of a fiction as the other mythological characters Nichol mentions in this passage: as he puts it in Book 6, “i’s a lie/dispenses the illusion of plot” (6.3). This “illusion,” the fiction of the unified subject, can only be dispelled with the unmasking of the Cartesian myth: the destabilization of the “e go” is encoded within the polysemy of this passage.

Nichol’s attempt to destabilize the self graphemically and conceptually corresponds to another subversive use of confession. Generally, the speech act of confession serves to establish truth, fulfilling what Foucault calls “one of the main moral obligations for any subject”: “to know oneself, to tell the truth about oneself and to constitute oneself as an object of knowledge both for other people and for oneself” (Foucault, 2007 : 151). The normative force of this mandate is made plain in Judith Butler’s assertion that “the subject is a consequence of certain rule-governed discourses that govern the intelligible invocation of identity” (Butler [1990] 2008:

185). Just as the decision to swaddle a young girl in pink signals her inscription within the conventions of her gender, so too does confession reinforce the subject’s conformity with moral norms. In both of these cases, the norm is not necessarily experienced as a conscious decision, but rather felt as a deep truth reconfirmed through the subject’s performance. Nichol’s orthographic disobedience draws attention to the conventional nature of “language as the chain they did not see” (2). The most powerful of these ‘chains’ is the anchor that grounds all first- person narratives, the “I” that guarantees their closure. Drawing attention to language as medium, including the artificial construct of the first-person pronoun, was a focus of his investigations as part of the Toronto Research Group, which he founded with Steve McCaffery.

143

The two sought to invent a “spatial, rather than sequential, syntax” in order to focus on language as a concrete building block rather than a transparent vessel of meaning (Billingham, 2000: 192).

Nichol explodes both this literary construct as well as its attendant teleological syntax. While overtly relying on the speech act of confession, he simultaneously questions the possibility of self-knowledge as well as the efficacy of self-descriptive declarations.

Nichol’s treatment of the subject marks another important departure from the praxis of the Confessional poets, who regarded the unified self as an ideal that could be achieved in poetry, if not in life. Although the subject of the Confessional poets was undoubtedly stylized rather than strictly autobiographical (as Robert Lowell eloquently expresses in his description of

Ariel as “the autobiography of a fever” [1965: vii]), on the whole, the narrative “I” remains largely stable. Rita Horváth attributes this to the therapeutic function of writing for many of the

Confessional poets, which she argues served as the privileged ground on which they could build a stable subject not available to them in life; in a somewhat extreme conflation of art and life, she accordingly regards the suicides of Berryman, Sexton, and Plath as confirmation that

“Confessional poetry thus failed in its therapeutic aim of creating integrated, unified selves”

(Horváth, 2005: 9). While Horváth’s account is highly reductionist, it does highlight the difference between the unity of the Confessional poetic subject and Nichol’s project of deliberate destabilization, as he shifts the emphasis away from the speaker towards the power concealed in language itself.

In adopting a confessional mode while simultaneously subverting its tenets of Truth and unified subjectivity, Nichol avoids a problem Felski names “the dialectic of intimacy and alienation” (1989: 104) whereby “the act of confession can potentially exacerbate rather than alleviate problems of self-identity, engendering a dialectic in which the production of ever more writing as a means to defining a center of meaning merely serves to underscore the alienation of

144 the subject even as it seeks to overcome it” (1989: 108). This is the kind of alienation with which the Confessional poets grapple in Rita Horváth’s account of their (failed) attempts to define a unified subject. The Martyrology, by contrast, is a testament to its writer’s delight in “the production of ever more writing,” not as a means of harmonizing the subject but as a staging of its fragmentary nature. If, as will be discussed presently, the use of the religious form of confession corresponds to the desire for transcendence, a secular analogue can be located in the poet’s refusal to be constrained by the proscriptive rubrics of generic or linguistic convention. By moving beyond these categories, Nichol is not so much rejecting one tradition as connecting his practice to a larger landscape of human endeavour, and, even beyond that, seeking communion with the divine.

The Quasi-Theology of The Martyrology

“ pen/ etrations/ at the corner of/ mundane & sacred/ snow in my/ shoe &/ dreams of/ Who?/ of some other, higher, life” (epigraph to Book 6).

When Nichol describes poetic composition as “this act this moment of confession or prayer” (3), it is significant that he elides two distinct religious practices. The purpose of prayer, a direct address to the divine, is “to strengthen [the] recognition of the presence of God, which draws us closer to Him” (Richert, “Prayer”); confession, as has been discussed, is a mediated process whereby “the priest grants [absolution] to the penitent (the person confessing his sins); the inward grace is the reconciliation of the penitent to God” (Richert, “Confession”). Nichol’s conflation of the two processes emerges from his desire to transcend the mundane and “contact, if you like, another level of the reality that we live in” (Nichol, 1988: 236). Indeed, overt instances of the speech act of confession, signalled by the words “I confess” or “forgive me,” are addressed directly to a divine being identified variously as “Lord,” “father” or “You.” Some

145 examplary usages appear in Book 3: “father i confess ignorance of what the next phrase is”; in

Book 4: “we are always/ pleading/ asking for/ forgiveness/ favours/ never the old hosannas we used to raise/ [...] forgive us”; in Book 5: “for that which i have done that has offended/ i seek forgiveness” (5); in Book 6: “forgive us for words said forgive us for words unsaid forgive us who loved You silently forgive us the day we failed You Lord forgive us the day we failed ourselves failing You Lord in a boat on the sea under the sun in the sky beyond us forgive us” (6). From a Christian point of view, these utterances are infelicitous, given that their content falls short of the convention that one confess to sins – “ignorance of what the next phrase is” is an aesthetic, not a moral, stumbling block. Likewise “that which i have done that has offended,” “words said” and “words unsaid,” “the day we failed You” and “the day we failed ourselves” are not sufficiently specific to felicitously perform a confessional speech act.149

Although Nichol’s speaker occasionally does “seek forgiveness,” The Martyrology differs from

Augustine’s Confessions insofar as he does not believe in a God capable of granting such forgiveness. Nichol does have conviction in a “sacred reality to the world” (Nichol, 1988: 235); however, the variously-signified deity he addresses is always partially a product of language, and not a God who sits on high dispensing absolution. Language and religious feeling are indissociable in Nichol’s metaphysics, and it is for this reason that I use the term quasi-theology as a means of describing his particular brand of spirituality. Within the quasi-theological mode, confession, which is conflated with prayer, becomes one of the privileged modes for addressing the divine.

Although Nichol’s vocabulary borrows heavily from religion, the examples cited above are clearly not instances of confession in the Catholic sense. Rather than seeking the intercession

149 These unspecific utterances violate Austin’s postulates “(B.1) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and (B.2) completely” ([1962] 1990: 14-15).

146 of a priest, the speaker confesses himself directly to God, using his address to explore questions of an existential and artistic, rather than strictly ethical, persuasion. He is not, it must be stated, simply flouting convention for the sake of iconoclasm: despite the unfashionability of transcendental signifieds in the era of “incrédulité envers les grands récits” (Lyotard 1979: 7),150

Nichol’s deep conviction in the sacredness of language can only be expressed in terms borrowed from religious discourse. Against other critics such as Smaro Kamboureli, whose purely deconstructive reading of the poem makes no allowances for the presence of a transcendental signified,151 Frank Davey maintains that

Despite the openness of The Martyrology as an unfinished poem, or of the narrative choices offered Book 5’s readers, or of the ‘playfulness’ of the many punning passages, the language theory implied here suggests a bound meaning: that a scrutiny of the signifiers will invariably lead back to ‘You’ or ‘Lord’, or at least the complex of meaning associated with ‘Lord’. (1988: 49)

Susan E. Billingham likewise suggests that “the fragmentation of the mortal human is continually contrasted with the unity of the immortal, the sacred. This is the crux of the matter, for while we drift amid the signifiers, [...] the absolute, transcendental signified goes on” (2000:

180). This thesis is borne out by Nichol’s apostrophe to the “Lord” in Book 5: “you tolerate them

Lord/ the many guises of your signifiers/ know you are the signified” (5). The presence of a transcendental signified in The Martyrology, although one that appears “in many guises,” sets the poem apart from the two texts considered in the previous chapter. The Handmaid’s Tale and

Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra parodically repurpose the speech act of confession in order to

150 “incredulity toward metanarratives” (1979: xxiv). 151 Kamboureli focuses on the text as artistic product, whose purpose is to deconstruct the discourse it employs. While her primary target is the “problematic self” (1988:96), over the course of her discussion she characterizes the religious content as “parodic inversion” (1988: 97) and suggests that the poet “invents his own origins” (1988: 96).

147 claim a voice from a subordinate subject position. They do so by dismantling dominant metanarratives: Atwood’s novel challenges the authority of patriarchal systems while Tremblay’s takes aim at the Catholic Church. Whereas those texts work to break down master narratives, The

Martyrology, conversely, works to build one: a sacred realm that transcends the quotidian.

However, while Nichol’s Presbyterian upbringing provides him with a ready wellspring of

Biblical images and stories (to which Nichol makes direct reference throughout the poem), these are but one component of a densely-populated spiritual terrain. They appear alongside the myths of the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, and Norse, East Asian spiritual traditions, as well, of course, as the invented hagiography that is a product of the poet’s own mind. Nichol creates an entirely new pantheon literally out of the fragments of language: St Reat, St Rain, St Orm and their brethren are born by fracturing ‘st’ words (stre[e]t, strain, storm).

The use of deconstruction and metatextuality as pathways to transcendence is very uncommon given that the general function of such strategies is “to trouble, to question, to make both problematic and provisional any […] desire for order or truth” (Hutcheon, 1988: 2). In The

Martyrology, by contrast, deconstructing language into its component parts reveals homophones, shared etymologies, and even phonemes that enable the poet’s rediscovery of a prelapsarian unity: “reaching back 4000 b c/indo-european still a linguistic unity/ pre-babel” (3). While some of the connections Nichol makes are historically and etymologically sound, others are purely associative:

or b d bidet confusion of childhood's ‘kaka’ the Egyptian ‘KA’ soul rising out of

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the body of the language

In this passage, “b d,” which can be supplemented by vowels to form either “bidet” or “body,” is paired with the letters “KA,” the ancient Egyptian word for “soul,” which likewise has a correlated bodily function in the word “kaka”; thus, bidet-body/kaka-soul, a connection between the coporeal and the spiritual. This is one example of the way Nichol mines the foundations of language to uncover latent connections between words, and by extension, between people separated historically or geographically. It is through these connections that Nichol begins to approach the sacred: as Neuman argues, “[l]anguage makes meaning in this writing: it does not record, image, interpret, or deduce it […] That mystery of the transformative and creative power of language proves analogous to the sacred in The Martyrology” (1988: 67).

Nichol’s quasi-theological approach to language has a precedent in the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, whose early essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of

Man” posits a similar connection between language and the divine. Benjamin rejected the idea that language was merely an “accidental” ([1916] 1996: 69) (or what Saussure termed

“differential”) system of signs, dismissing this as the “bourgeois view of language” ([1916]

1996: 69). In his view, all of nature speaks a “mute” ([1916] 1996: 70) language, but the power to assign names is a gift divinely and exclusively bestowed upon man. The exercise of this faculty, “the translation of an imperfect language [i.e. the “mute” language of nature] into a more perfect one [the spoken language of man]” ([1916] 1996:70), brings us closer to God. Benjamin singles out the proper name as a privileged zone of contact between man and God, calling it “the point where human language participates most intimately in the divine infinity of the pure word,”

“the frontier between finite and infinite language” ([1916] 1996: 69). In his view, the power of humans to assign proper names is indicative of a certain ontological autonomy: “man is the only

149 one who names his own kind, as he is the only one whom God did not name” ([1916] 1996: 69).

Nichol displays a similar mysticism in his view of language as infused with the divine, as well as in his particular attention to the power latent in the proper name. In The Martyrology, an important intermediary between humans and God is the assemblage of saints, who, as discussed, are born when ordinary words reveal their divine names. In a similar vein, Nichol turns his attention in Book 5 to the streets of Toronto that make up his world, unlocking the secret meanings hidden in their appellations. Harbord Street “Harbored/ Harbour D/ (a harmony)/only puns someone says/ i says glimpses of another truth”(5). “i live on Brun’s wick,” the poet tells us, “so named ‘cause it stuck out/ think as his legendary stick” (5). This fictional mythology develops as the wordplay intensifies: we meet “Wal Mer’s pa Dina Madi’[s] son/ (her one &/ only) images of/ ancient lineages” (5). These mythologies are not just ludic exercises in the deconstruction of language, but real “glimpses of another truth,” for Nichol’s God infuses language with His presence, and is in turn only accessible through language. He is a

God of (the many) (no) names who is (the one) (the many) (above) (around) (inside) all (watched) (did not watch) over everything (5)

This is one of many passages in which Nichol suggests that although God is only accessible through language, He also transcends the “names” that humans attach to him. At the same time, it calls to mind the standard Christian paradoxes: God is infinitely describable, but likewise exceeds definition. He is both the one (God the Father) and the many (the Holy Trinity). He is omniscient yet hidden from view. He watches over everything, yet seems not to be watching, for example when ‘bad things happen to good people’.

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While Nichol’s understanding of the divine is clearly informed by a Christian imaginary, it is also very distinct from this tradition. In Book 1, feeling creatively uninspired and spiritually vacant, Nichol proclaims,

oh god you are dead you are dead dead dead christ you are dead you are dead dead dead what can i do who shall i be i can’t see you any more no direction sign or longing only the space behind my eyes screaming. (1)

On the one hand, Nichol continues to apostrophize a “god,” signalling his desire to continue working within a metaphysical framework. The apostrophe to “god” mobilizes the rhetorical power of a speech act, as it moves the address from the realm of ordinary speech into the privileged terrain of communion with the divine; here, however ‘this moment of confession or prayer’ becomes a self-defeating speech act insofar as it addresses the very being whose death it is proclaiming. This instant of infelicitous speech emblematizes the futile attempt to address a

God who can no longer serve as a viable ordering system. Austin classifies this kind of infelicity as insincerity:

Suppose I did say ‘the cat is on the mat’ when it is not the case that I believe that the cat is on the mat, what should we say? Clearly it is a case of insincerity. [...] The insincerity of an assertion is the same as the insincerity of a promise, since both promising and asserting are procedures intended for use by persons having certain thoughts. ‘I promise but do not intend’ is parallel to ‘it is the case but I do not believe it’ (Austin 1962 (1975): 50)

The only way to reconcile the sustained apostrophe to God with the assertion that he is “dead dead dead” is to suggest that, in spite of Nichol’s reliance on Christian iconography and narrative, he nevertheless espouses the Nietzschean belief in the death of God. Nichol moreover

151 makes reference in Book 2 to the death of his invented saints, suggesting the failure of his attempt to replace the Christian God with a self-styled pantheon. An anecdote in Book 2 attests that the language of deicide accurately embodies Nichol’s experience: “the girl approached me when the reading ended/ her own experience with christ/ wanted to share it with me/ loving as she said she did say/ the religious sense in my poems/ knowing you were all dead saint rand/ what could i say” (2). Nichol is unable to relate to this woman because not only is his version of faith entirely removed from her Christian understanding, but at this point in the poem he has lost faith even in his own invented theology.

In the absence of the Christian narrative, Nichol confesses, “lonely father/ i am lonely father/ father i am lonely/ knowing they are dead/ they are dead dead dead” (2). Like so many writers and thinkers of the twentieth century, Nichol recognizes the collapse of the Christian metanarrative, and struggles to understand “how i’m to travel on without word from you” (3). At the same time, the evanescence of a prefabricated metanarrative opens up the possibility for the very kind of exploration Nichol will undertake over the course of The Martyrology’s nine volumes. Amy Hungerford provides a literary context for such an endeavour in the work of late- twentieth-century American writers such as Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo, in whose writing “meaning drops away from language [...] to create a formal space that we find filled with religious feeling, supernatural power, otherworldly communion, and transcendent authority” (2010: xvi). By scrutinizing instances of non-sense in these writers, linking their practice to religious phenomena such as glossolalia (speaking in tongues), she is led to conclude that “literary beliefs are not always distinct from religious beliefs and […] literary practices are not always separate from religious ones” (2010: 139). The same can be said of Nichol’s work, where the “explosion of syntax” (McCaffery, 1986: 60) becomes the basis for a return to the very

God from whom the speaker announces at the outset that he has become estranged.

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Given the indissociability of spirituality and language in The Martyrology, it comes as no surprise that Nichol’s proclamation of the death of the saints corresponds to a period of artistic self-doubt. At the beginning of Book 3 we encounter the poet “sick of everything i’ve written”:

“i have nothing to say/ & i am saying it,” he quips (3). Whereas the saints once served as a viable metaphor for Nichol’s attempt to contact the sacred, by Book 3 they have lost their lustre:

“there’s a poem i should write/ some sort of image of the cosmic hitch-hiker/ [...] once he might have been saint ranglehold or reat/ now there’s no name to give him” (3). This ‘cosmic hitch- hiker’ is the figure par excellence of the subject unmoored from ordering metanarratives. “i wanted an image or a metaphor,” he admits, “something to contain me”; with the death of the saints, however, he has lost this image, and apostrophises the now formless divinity, stating,

“you have no name now/ only a being so alive/ i know you’re still with me” (3). In spite of the loss of his governing metaphor, Nichol continues to write, and, even more significantly, to address his words to a “god” whom he implores, “pray god do let the consonance lead me” (3).

Nichol’s conviction in the power of language remains, his faith in the divine presence stronger than the particular metaphor he attaches to its representation. This fact highlights yet again the distinctly un-Christian nature of his religious sentiment. However, it must be noted that Nichol likewise departs from the postmodernist trajectory insofar as he remains committed to the pursuit of a transcendent realm. Thus, the self-negating speech acts by which he proclaims the death of

God ultimately pave the way for a new, more vital spiritual vocabulary. Richard Rorty affirms the necessity of such redescriptions, stating that “[a] sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species” (1989: 20). Nichol’s place within this vanguard is established through his deconstruction, first of the words out of which the saints were born, and subsequently of the saints themselves as they are absorbed back into language.

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The death of the saints occurs against the horizon of the poet’s sustained metatextual commentary. In Book 1, he considers the process of creating a mythology, concluding, “there are no myths we have not created/ ripped whole from our lived long days/ no legends that could not be lies” (1). Nichol is clearly making reference here to his role as creator of a fictional

Martyrology; moreover, he suggests that human existence depends on the creation of just such myths, be they the authorized stories of the Bible or the inventions of poets. Other metatextual references intervene throughout the poem to destabilize the integrity of its content: in Book 4, for example, we overhear the poet “talking with steve [McCaffery]/ comparing forms/ his

CARNIVAL/ ‘my’ MARTYROLOGY” (4). Book 5 opens with an epigraph excerpted from a letter the poet received, “what is the relationship of someone to the mythology they make up?”

(5). These metatextual remarks ground the poem in the real process of composition, documenting the artistic process. In Book 5, Nichol uses language borrowed from economics to draw attention to the means of production, undermining the authority of the poem as a closed, self-contained artefact:

u'n a me

u name me 'i forget you' i name me anew claim my signs my me m a r t in the word mart the word m art yr ology the ology word ology (5)

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Through the use of metatextual discourse and deconstruction, Nichol resists the commodification of the poem into what Marx, in Das Kapital, calls a fetish: “so soon as [a product] steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent” (2000: 50). Even the single word must be decommodified, removed from the tired economy of language in order to regain its prelapsarian potency. In this instance, the word “martyrology” is broken into what a mathematician would refer to as ‘factors’. ‘mart’ becomes the marketplace in which this new economy of ‘naming anew’ and ‘claiming signs’ is to be conducted: within its boundaries we encounter “art” and “the ology,” which Nichol connects to “word ology.” Marx’s comment is particularly fitting given

Nichol’s stated desire to access a transcendent, spiritual reality. However, Nichol’s aim is to resist producing a poem-as-commodity, what he calls “accumulating poems as one accumulates points on a scale/ moving up towards the ultimate chair or throne” (3). In the place of this acquisitive metaphor, he consistently refers to poetry as a form of deconstruction: we are

“prisoners of our frameworks” (5) who have to dismantle the “phony architecture” (1), “rip off the mask of words to free the sounds” (1); only after the mask has been removed will the “the ology” of language reveal itself.

Nichol’s resistance to the commodification of the poem is perhaps best embodied in

Book 9, the final installment in The Martyrology, which is mostly comprised of musical scores to be chanted. Chanting was a central component of Nichol’s practice, which was adapted from his work with the therapeutic community of Therafields and was consolidated with the formation of the Four Horsemen in 1970.152 Throughout the 1970s, Nichol was extremely focused on

152 The Four Horsemen were comprised of Nichol, Steve McCaffery, Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera. As the latter recalls in a historical note included in the group’s album CaNADAda, “After a bp nichol/steve mccaffery reading at Town Hall... I approached barrie and suggested the three of us should jam together some time and see what we’d come up with” (qtd. in Scobie, 1984: 68-69).

155 exploring the dynamics of oral performance, turning, as Steven Scobie notes, “so much of his energy away from visual poetry toward sound” (1984: 76). Scobie signals the deconstructive power latent in orality, which “unlocks language” by “inserting itself between signifier and signified, and so opening the door to the free flow of dissemination” (1984: 76). Although each performance was ‘scored’, the unpredictability of the live event heightened the sense of

Derridean différance153 identified by Scobie. Moreover, the impossibility of ever repeating precisely the same poem drove an important wedge in the “antholegaic voice of the poetry biz”

(Nichol 6.6). Whereas many of the pieces performed by the Four Horsemen were comprised in whole or in part of asemantic phonemes, the songs in Book 9 contain long, lyrical passages, which sound a lot like church hymns. The piece “we’re going to saints” includes the lyrics,

“we’re going to saints fabulous and faithful saints of language saints of spirit saints of song of being blessed” (9). In “this is a love song” the voice part labelled “st agnes” sings “home or a heaven a haven or simply being here in the world this world and therefore i praise therefore i sing of the heart celebrate the dwelling place that which is that which is that which is” (9) The

Martyrology’s deeply affirmative ending recalls David Lose’s definition of the kind of confession that functions as preaching, or publicly “articulating one’s most deeply held convictions” (Lose, 2003: 63). Lose regards this form of affirmation as a corrective to “the doubt and skepticism of the postmodern age” (2003: 105). Paradoxically, the deconstructive, what I have called quasi-theological, orientation of The Martyrology must be regarded as affirmative in

153 Derrida defines différance, a neologism built from the words “difference” and “deferral,” for the first time in his essay “Cogito et histoire de la folie”: “L’économie de cette écriture est un rapport réglé entre l’excédent et la totalité excédée: la différance de l’excès absolu” (1967: 96). [“The economy of this writing is a relationship between that which exceeds and the exceeded totality: the différance of this absolute excess” (1978: 62).] In applying it here, I am referring to the way that meaning is deferred through the act of representation, such that a generative space always opens between the score and its performance.

156 the same sense Lose describes here. The text thus becomes the staging ground for the poet’s articulation of a viable postmodern faith.

Postmodernity and religious sentiment need not be irreconcilable. According to Mark C.

Taylor, arguably the most important scholar in the field of postmodern religion, “deconstruction is the ‘hermeneutic’ of the death of God. As such, it provides a possible point of departure for a postmodern a/theology” (1984: 6). He argues that modern secular humanism has simply substitued the self in the place of God as the guarantor of meaning, and that this gesture constitutes a reversal, rather than a subversion, of preexisting binaries. Taylor identifies four tenets that have characterized Western theology, “God, self, history, and book” (1984: 7), and provides decontructive readings of each. The last is of particular relevance to Nichol’s project in

The Martyrology. Taylor posits the openness of the ‘text’ as a deconstructive challenge to the finality of the ‘book’: “In contrast to the closure of the book, the text is radically open. It is neither self-contained nor definitively bound in a single volume. A text is more like a fabric with loose ends than a hemmed cloth” (1984: 178). Loose ends dangle at every layer of The

Martyrology: they are detectable in the experimental typography (variable alignment of words and spacing, lack of page numbers, inclusion of hand-drawn images), non-standard orthography, inconsistent use of biographical detail, metatextual discourse, alterations in tone, and instability of the subject, to name but several examples. Nichol’s deconstructive use of the hallmarks of confessional speech, in both the literary and the religious context, is consistent with this project.

The sincerity he attaches to this endeavour distinguishes his pratice from the current of postmodernism that would do away with metaphysics altogether. Nichol thus bears out Taylor’s approbation of deconstructive practice as the basis not only for literary innovation, but, beyond the literary, for a form of spiritual renewal.

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By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept: Introduction

Although they are perhaps at first blush an unlikely pairing, Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central

Station I Sat Down and Wept154 actually has much in common with Nichol’s Martyrology. In addition to the detail that both writers wrote parts of their work in their personal diaries, a fact that is encoded within the ambiguous genre of their respective texts, a thematic similarity is likewise detectable in their writing: both Nichol and Smart use religious imagery, and do so with sincerity. While Nichol undermines the hallmarks of confessional speech, his use of a religious vocabulary represents a genuine attempt to connect with the transcendent, sacred dimension of reality. Smart also appeals to religion in her writing, deploying Biblical imagery as a means of legitimating the socially transgressive morays espoused by her narrator. She articulates this legitimation by way of a confessional speech that grounds itself in a rejection of guilt and shame, as well as an idiosyncratic definition of truth that positions beauty, and its handmaiden love, as the highest virtues to which one can aspire.

In 1940, as Elizabeth Smart was beginning to write in her journal the entries that would eventually serve as the basis for By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, the world was becoming increasingly engulfed in the Second World War. For Smart, however, a more pressing

“catastrophe” (33) (a word she will use to describe the love affair thematized in her novel) was her burgeoning relationship with the married English poet George Barker. Although, for reasons that will be discussed, it is wrong to conflate Smart’s literary creation with the details of her life, it is fair to say that both author and text seemingly privilege personal suffering over global unrest: in her biography, Rosemary Sullivan notes Smart’s mother Louie’s complaint that her daughter “wasn’t contributing to the war effort” (1991: 135). In By Grand Central Station, a few

154 I will subsequently abbreviate the title to By Grand Central Station.

158 scant references to “the bombs [...] dropping above” (65) gesture towards an awareness of the unfolding global disaster, but the narrator nevertheless insists that there can be no calamity greater than unfulfilled longing: as she puts it, “love still uproots the heart better than an imagined landmine” (79). The privileging of “the battlefield” (Heaps, 1994) of personal suffering above the ravages of war is but one of By Grand Central Station’s arresting claims. Elsewhere, the narrator likens herself to Christ, going as far as to envy him the brevity of his three-day passion, in distinction to her boundless torment at the desertion of her lover (86). These extreme comparisons occur within the context of a story that chronicles the narrator’s adulterous relationship with a married poet, figured in the heroic terms of The Song of Solomon. So horrified was Smart’s mother, Louie, by what she perceived as the text’s moral degeneracy, that upon publication she immediately bought the only six available copies in an Ottawa dry goods store and promptly burned them. She also successfully petitioned External Affairs to prevent the book’s importation into Canada (Sullivan, 1991: 229).155 In spite of the narrator’s grandiose self- stylings, however, and in spite of its morally questionable premise, By Grand Central Station successfully seduces its reader into its world, where “love has other laws” (84) than the conventions of the terrestrial realm. It does so through the use of a confessional discourse in which the narrator aligns herself with mythical lovers throughout history, including figures drawn from various cultural traditions, but most centrally from the Biblical Song of Solomon.

Smart positions her narrator’s love within the aesthetic of beauty, using beautiful language to convince the reader of its inherent value. Confessional discourse thus functions in the novel as a means of questioning prevailing social norms, strategically mobilizing its performative power to legitimate its challenge.

155 Smart’s biographer Rosemary Sullivan wryly comments, “Louie was always thorough” (1991: 229).

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Smart’s use of confessional discourse is characterized by the same referential ambiguity present in Nichol’s Martyrology. Like Nichol, Smart wrote parts of By Grand Central Station in her personal diary: her editor comments that her final notebooks contain “poems by both Smart and George Barker” as well as “recipes and beginning drafts of By Grand Central Station I Sat

Down and Wept” (Van Wart, 1986: 247). Smart destabilizes attempts at generic categorization by incorporating passages from her journal into her avowedly fictional novel. Beyond the simple matter of the writer’s choice of medium, moreover, the love story she details in her novel bears a striking resemblance to her own affair with the married poet George Barker; although the characters in By Grand Central Station are unnamed, or, in the case of minor characters, given fictional names, geographic locations remain unchanged, as do biographical details such as the couple’s arrest at the American border. For this reason, some critics have been unable to divest themselves of the conviction that the novel is indissociable from Smart’s own journal and as such is “not imagined or preconceived in totality prior to her writing, but develops as [Smart] lives through these experiences” (Horne, 1991). As a “novel-journal,” Dee Horne argues that the work’s four most important characteristics are “truthfulness, credibility, compression, and intimacy” (1991). It is hardly coincidental that these same four postulates also describe confessional writing, a connection Horne herself makes. On the other hand, Robert McGill characterizes the desire to conflate By Grand Central Station with Elizabeth Smart’s biography as “an almost emblematic glimpse into the development of confessional culture in the latter half of the twentieth century” (2007: 69). Against the will of “referentially desirous readers” (2007:

80), McGill insists that the text’s intimacy “is an illusion” (2007: 82) that its “alternative hermeneutic model” works to dispel (2007: 80); Rosemary Sullivan confirms this view in her characterization of the love story as “archetypal” rather than “autobiographical” (1991: 153). It is possible to take McGill’s argument one step further and suggest that the site of engagement with

160 confessional culture is not merely at the level of the text’s reception, but, in fact, embedded in the text itself. Like Nichol and the writers discussed in the previous chapter, Smart invents an alternative confessional discourse that overturns the traditional postulates of confession, specifically, in her text, the presence of guilt and the demand for forgiveness. If Nichol’s transcendental signified can be identified with a God-figure, it is equally possible to locate

Smart’s within the profound experience of passionate love. Smart’s idiosyncratic use of the confessional form serves to elevate her transcendent love above mundane moral scruples, seducing the reader into choosing beauty over judgment.

The Seduction of By Grand Central Station

In By Grand Central Station, “an interior monologue in the confessional mode” (McMullen,

1983: 184), plot is subordinate to poetic expression. The novel opens in California with the arrival by bus of the man who will become the narrator’s lover, accompanied by his wife. After a half-hearted effort to resist consummating their relationship for the sake of the marriage, the narrator quickly yields to her desire, rhapsodizing at length about a passion only slightly tempered by her sense of wrongdoing. The couple is subsequently arrested at the Arizona border for committing adultery, a criminal offence, and separated; this separation foreshadows the ultimate cleavage that occurs at the novel’s end when the pregnant narrator is deserted by her lover, who returns to his wife. Because the story is told entirely from the narrator’s point of view, and because it takes the form of a passionate outpouring of poetic language, the reader is easily

‘seduced’, as Shoshana Felman puts it, by narrative. Drawing on Austin’s theory of speech acts,

Felman argues that “[l]e piège de la séduction consiste [...] à produire une illusion référentielle par un énoncé qui est—par excellence—sui-référentiel: l’illusion d’un acte d’engagement réel ou

161 hors-linguistique créée par une énonciation qui ne se réfère qu’à elle-même” (1980: 39-40).156

This kind of unmoored confession can be distinguished from that of Augustine, who Peter

Brooks argues “can stabilize his confessions in the discovery of real truth” (2000: 52). In By

Grand Central Station, conversely, the loss of “any referential stability” (Brooks, 2000: 52) enables Smart to perform an elaborate act of seduction: she ingeniously uses the armature of a confession to give legitimacy to her speech act, but subtly manipulates its premises such that we realize we are operating somewhere “on that razor-sharp edge that distinguishes morality from libertinism” (Frojendahl, 2004) rather than within a conventional Christian moral framework.

Significantly, Smart retains a moral vocabulary; her goal, I will demonstrate, is to inscribe her love within a system of values that adheres to the alternative order of beauty.

One of the most powerful ways the narrator begins the process of seduction is by using personification and pathetic fallacy to suggest that nature itself approves of her affair. Eschewing the Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, Smart depicts nature as an animate force deeply intertwined with human drama. The first sexual interaction between the narrator and her lover occurs “[u]nder the waterfall” where she tells us “the new moss caressed me and the water over my feet and the ferns approved me with endearments: ‘My darling, my darling, lie down with us now for you also are earth whom nothing but love can sow’” (24).

Nature is here figured both as a participant and an adjudicator in the sex act: the diction moves from sensuality (“caressed me”) to morality (“approved me”), culminating in an apostrophe through which Smart literally embodies the voice of the earth as it gives its blessing to the union.

This vitalism expands to encompass the whole universe when the narrator later claims that

156 “[t]he trap of seduction [...] consists in producing a referential illusion through an utterance that is by its very nature self-referential: the illusion of a real or extralinguistic act of commitment created by an utterance that refers only to itself” (Felman, 1983: 31).

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“[e]ons have been evolving and planets disintegrating and forming to compel these two together”

(69). The sense of fatality expressed here is another of the narrator’s rhetorical motifs, and one which is literally inscribed within the natural world, where the “thick-leaf hands of the castor tree forbode[s] disaster” (18) and “poison oak grows over the path and over the banks [...] both warning of and recording fatality” (19). These natural phenomena become a “code” (34) whose decipherment results in the revelation of a primal truth. Only the narrator, however, seems to possess the key. She dons the mantle of the seer or prophet, who is vested with the power to make such Yeatsian pronouncements as, “The sand of catastrophe is loosed and every breast is marked with doom” (33).157 When, from her prison cell, she observes a pepper-tree outside her window “droop[ing] with green love” she wonders, “Did they see such flagrant proof and still not believe?” (49). Those people who are critical of the relationship—“the leering police thugs,”

“Mr Wurtle and his conventional pin-pricks,” “the well-meaning matrons”—become, in her account, a “parade of unbelievers” (61). Love is depicted as a kind of pagan religion that is beyond the power of the individual, allied to a more fundamental natural force; as Love’s prophet, the narrator represents herself as being in direct communion with these primal forces that animate the universe. To be on the narrator’s side is to join the community of the faithful in a religion of love and beauty, an option that is much more desirable, for the reader, than ranging oneself among the parade of heretical nay-sayers.

157 The imagery here recalls that of Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” specifically the lines, “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned” (poetryfoundation.org). The extent to which the novel is a stylized rather than autobiographical account becomes clear when one considers the presence of such foreshadowing details, even in the midst of the narrator’s most vehement accesses of passion.

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While the narrator’s vitalistic understanding of nature repeatedly appears as a feature of

Smart’s diaries,158 the imbrication of the human and nature on display here must be regarded as specifically related to the novel’s main intertext, The Song of Solomon. The Song of Songs, as it is called, is a book of the Old Testament written in highly poetic language and structured as a dialogue between two lovers. It is singular in both the Jewish and Christian traditions for its blatant eroticism, which has led many religious exegetes throughout the ages to read it allegorically, either as a parable for the relationship between God and Israel or Christ and the

Church (Hunt, 2008: 9). Although the allegorical reading persists, contemporary scholars appear to be increasingly comfortable accepting its sensuality at face value: one critic goes as far as to name it a “Hebrew Kamasutra” (Hunt, 2008: ix). Germane to the present discussion is the notable detail that it is uncertain whether the lovers at the center of the text are in fact married

(although “pious exegetes of the synagogue and church” were apparently very insistent that they be regarded as such [Hunt, 2008: 3]). In their poetic address, both lovers draw heavily from the natural world to convey their feelings. The female interlocutor describes herself as “the rose of

Sharon, and the lily of the valleys” (2.1). Her beloved “is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi” (1.14). The writer159 periphrastically evokes the spring as “the time of the singing birds” (2.12), beseeching his lover, “Arise my fair one, and come away” (2.13). The interpenetration of the human and the natural world present in The Song of Solomon is clearly a prototype for Smart’s poetic landscape.

158 A year before starting By Grand Central Station, for example, she describes herself as a “continuation of the ground I walk on” (Smart, 1986: 199). 159 Although it is called the Song of Solomon, this is most certainly an honourific or strategic attribution which “lends credibility to a book which would need a powerful proponent due to its controversial language. Solomon was a huge mythic personality about whom nearly anything would be believable, a legendary erotic life which would make all of these associations of exotic physicality and wealth natural” (Hunt, 2008: 5).

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The Song of Solomon functions as a sustained intertext throughout the novel, to the extent that one is almost tempted to call it a hypotext (Genette, 1982: 11).160 Smart’s reworking of The Song involves a strategic, rather than a literal, use of its components. For example, both texts are marked by the desertion of the lover. In the Song, the female speaker describes herself as having

opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer. The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me. I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love. (5.6-8)

The narrator of By Grand Central Station similarly aligns desertion with physical pain and illness, wondering with characteristic hyperbole why “no one has noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury me” (85). The “watchmen” make an appearance in Smart’s novel, in the guise of the policemen who stop the couple at the border and in response to whose interrogation Smart offers up lines quoted verbatim from The Song of Solomon: “(Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.)/ Stay put! cried the guard, and struck me” (48). However, whereas The Song ends with the reunion of the lovers and an affirmation of the power of love – “love is strong as death”

(8.6); “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it” (8.7) – the ending of

By Grand Central Station is inconclusive at best. The lovers remain apart, the narrator calling

160 A hypo/hypertext is, according to Genette, a more sustained form of intertextuality where one text is actually a transformation of another, rather than simply marked by isolated allusions (Genette, 1982: 11). By Grand Central Station is deeply indebted to “The Song of Solomon,” as I discuss here. Nevertheless, it is to my mind a stretch to describe Smart’s novel as a hypertext given the prevalence and reoccurence of other intertexts, including the reference to “Psalm 137” from which it derives its title. Moreover, to subsume her varied set of images under one main narrative is to do the text an injustice. I therefore consider the “Song of Solomon” a sustained intertext rather than a hypotext, in Genette’s sense of the term.

165 out rhetorically into the void, “My dear, my darling, do you hear me where you sleep?” (112).

Although the two texts end differently, this fact is peripheral to Smart’s purpose, as her identification with the lovers of The Song of Solomon is meant to inscribe her love affair within the canon of history’s great love stories. Smart also uses intertexts from mythology, religion and literature to cast herself, among others, as Leda (25), Christ (86) and Macbeth (18), carving a niche for herself within the particular sub-category of heroic figures who met tragic ends.

Against the hyperbolic grandeur of this passion that “kindled the world” (97), Smart uses poetic devices of diminishment to reduce the lover’s wife to the level of the miniscule, “the flowers that I crush with my foot when I walk in the field” (24). The narrator’s first glimpse of the wife is expressed in synecdoche, as “her eyes come forward out of the vulgar disembarkers” off the bus (17). She further characterizes these as “madonna eyes, soft as the newly-born, trusting as the untempted” (17). Physiologically speaking, eyes are a particularly vulnerable point on the human body, in addition to their function as an important vehicle for expressing emotion. Drawing attention to them synechdochically reduces the wife to a site of vulnerability, and also foreshadows the devastation that these eyes will putatively express after the affair has begun. The imagery oscillates throughout this and other passages between the innocence of the child and that of the virgin mother; the latter characterization is particularly important as it sets her chastity against the narrator’s flagrant sensuality. This contrast is emphasized when the narrator observes the wife “[s]itting nymphlike in the pool,” with her hair falling “like sorrow, like mercy, like the mourning-weeds of pity” (23). Again, Smart uses the dual figuration of the child, here a ‘nymph’, and the religious icon whose anthropomorphised hair forms a kind of pieta, adorned as it is with Marian adjectives. The description continues with

her pathetic slenderness [...] covered over with a love as gentle as trusting as tenacious as the birds who rebuild their continually violated nests. When she

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clasps her hands happily to a tune she likes, it is more moving than I can bear. She is the innocent who is always the offering. (23-24)

Here, synecdoche, simile and metaphor confirm the reduction in scale. The substantive adjective

‘slenderness’ functions synecdochically to reduce her physical size, a movement that is picked up by the simile that follows in which she is likened to a perseverant bird. Another synecdochic focalization highlights another part of her body, this time the hands, clapping like a child.

Finally, she morphs into the ultimate figure of the victim, having been stripped even the limited agency of the bird or the child and now, by way of metaphor, lying on the altar of sacrifice. The rhetoric of victimization achieves its full expression in the narrator’s characterization of her as the “lamb of God” (24), evoking innocence and sacrifice in the same breath.

These are but a few examples of a set of reductive images that appear throughout the novel, and which are always tied to the narrator’s reflection on her own responsibility for having trespassed against such an innocent, helpless creature, “she whom I have injured,” who “lies gasping, but still living, on the land” (33) and on whose “mangledness I am spreading my amorous sheets” (31). Against the triumphant sublimity of the natural world as it endorses her love, Smart figures her adversary in terms of nature’s fragility: “I have broken her heart like a robin’s egg” (35), she confesses; “the gentle flowers, unable to die unceremoniously, remind me of her grief” (35). The narrator’s repeated self-denunciations as well as her overt references to having committed a “crime” (32) suggest that her affair is not unaccompanied by a knowledge of her culpability. “So hourly,” she tells us, “at the slightest noise, I start, I stand ready to feel the roof cave in on my head, the thunder of God’s punishment announcing the limit of his endurance” (27). She personifies the doves in the trees as “the hangmen” who “mercilessly coo my sentence in the woods” (23). The natural world is impregnated not only with her love, but

167 equally with the corrective to this love, the perpetual reminder that it is predicated on the wife’s

“martyrdom” (31).

It is important to distinguish culpability, the “responsibility for a fault or wrong”

(oxforddictionaries.com), from guilt, the “feeling of having committed wrong or failed in an obligation” (oxforddictionaries.com) (emphasis mine). Whereas Adele Heaps has argued that the narrator “seems driven, for the most part, by a need to alleviate her/her narrator’s guilt over wounding another woman” (1994), it is my contention that, while the narrator is aware that she has trespassed against her lover’s wife and frequently refers to this knowledge, her professions of guilt fail to convince. She tells us that she is “unable to assuage my guilt,” apostrophically suggesting the “dove in the eucalyptus” tell her “how to atone” (35); however, this apostrophe to an imagined interlocutor who is in fact incapable of speech suggests that she is being rhetorical rather than following up on the desire to make a felicitous confession. The expression of guilt is further undermined by the admission, later in the text, that “it is not for her my heart opens and breaks: I die again and again only for myself” (86). It is clear that guilt is not the primary motivator for the narrator’s confession. Paul de Man has argued that, in fact, the abdication of responsibility is latent in many ostensibly self-recriminatory speech acts. He maintains that confessional language must be regarded as characterized by “a double epistemological perspective: it functions as a verifiable referential cognition, but it also functions as a statement whose reliability cannot be verified by empirical means” (1979: 281). For Felman, the gap between these two modes occasions the possibility of seduction; for de Man, “the possibility of excuse” (1979: 281). Both modalities are present in By Grand Central Station: in order for the narrator successfully to seduce her reader into accepting the terms of her adulterous relationship, it is necessary for her to find ways of excusing her trespasses against another woman. This is perhaps the most difficult undertaking, given that it is easier to denounce repressive social

168 morays than it is to justify her claim to another woman’s husband. However, Smart succeeds in making a compelling case for her narrator by means of two very distinct, and in fact somewhat contradictory, rhetorical strategies: on the one hand, she asserts her moral righteousness, and on the other, depicts herself as a victim of the inescapable hand of fate. One way of regarding the confession at the heart of By Grand Central Station is to understand it as geared not primarily toward the admission of sins, but toward the seduction of its reader through an elaborately- contrived excuse.

The narrator situates her moral high ground within “a larger, more permissive and sexually anarchic logic of nature,” in whose lexicon “[p]ost-coital guilt and repentance have no place” (Heaps, 1994). This point is best illustrated in the scene of the narrator’s first sexual interaction with her lover “under the waterfall,” after which she writes, “Absolve me, I prayed, up through the cathedral redwoods, and forgive me if this is sin. But the new moss caressed me

[...]” (24). This passage, as we know, continues with nature’s imagined panegyric to the narrator, a scene that is later revisited with the additional detail that “[t]he winds boomed triumph” (34).

The half-hearted, distinctly infelicitous attempt at confession is reduced to a mere formality, on a par in its inconsequentiality with the social norm that the narrator has violated. Her sense of being in the moral right is later confirmed explicitly, in her assertion, as she prepares to return to her parents’ house, that she is “[a]sking no one’s forgiveness for sins I refuse to recognize” (56).

Moreover, when weighing her lover’s decision to return to his wife, the narrator characterizes his emotion as “pity” (68; 84), which she personifies, rather than “guilt”: “he says it was in Pity’s name, and that Pity was only fighting a losing battle with Love, he was useless to Pity” (84). The choice of this particular noun, with its pejorative connotation, demotes the wife from the status of an equal against whom one can trespass to a subordinate creature, here represented as the adversary of Love. The narrator confirms this power dynamic in her likening of Pity to “a

169 beggar-child” who “sidles up to you with beseeching palms and eyes more moving than beauty”

(68). This imagery directly echoes the attention paid earlier in the text to the wife’s eyes, hands, and childlike qualities, now confirming her presence within the ranks of the unbelievers, the impediments to the narrator’s transcendent Love.

The opposition established between the beggar-child Pity and “beauty” represents another important step in the narrator’s seduction of the reader, for, in the text, beauty is not simply an aesthetic category—it is a moral imperative.161 Things that are beautiful are also understood to be good, an insight that art critic Arthur Danto traces back to Kant: beauty “symbolizes morality”

(Danto, 2003: 40) insofar as it “has a claim to be a value, like truth and goodness. The annihilation of beauty would leave us with an unbearable world, as the annihilation of the good would leave us with a world in which a fully human life would be unliveable” (Danto, 2003: 60).

In By Grand Central Station, passionate love is a beautiful thing, and therefore, the narrator’s reasoning follows, any impediment to the pursuit of her passion is an affront against the good.

The narrator mobilizes the Kantian logic described by Danto in support of her assertion that

“there is no beauty in denying love”: “To deny love, to deceive it meanly by pretending that what is unconsummated remains eternal, or that love sublimated reaches highest heavenly love, is repulsive” (26). Dante’s Divine Comedy (specifically Paradise) is a clear intertext, here, in its movement from terrestrial love to the divine “love that moves the sun and the other stars”

(XXXIII.145). However, the narrator of By Grand Central Station rejects the Christian teleology: whereas Dante encounters and glorifies figures of chastity, the narrator here recasts

161 While this is particularly evident in By Grand Central Station, several scholars have argued that aesthetics are always subtended by ideology. Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) is the most notable example of this line of inquiry.

170 this image as “repulsive,” positioning against it the beauty of terrestrial, sexual, love. A passage from Smart’s diary is instructive in understanding the view of beauty expounded in the novel:

Beauty is rare. [...] Beauty is not sight or sound. It is a feeling. It is a spirit. It permeates through you. It urges you out in a gesture of abandonment or surrender [...] Beauty is holy. Beauty is earthly. It is God. It is sex. It is the momentary harmonious union of God with nature. (January 9, 1938) (1986: 170-171)

For the narrator, “the miracle” (40), far from the purity of unconsummated love, is precisely the power of erotic love to transmute the ordinary into the beautiful:

It has happened, the miracle has arrived, everything begins today, everything you touch is born; the new moon attended by two enormous stars; the sunny day fading with a glow to exhiliration; all the paraphernalia of existence, all my sad companions of these last twenty years, the pots and pans in Mrs Wurtle’s kitchen, ribbons of streets, wilted geraniums, thin children’s legs, all the world solicits me with joy, leaps at me electrically, claiming its birth at last. (40)

The ordinary “paraphernalia of existence” are given a new, cosmic significance when touched by the rays of the narrator’s love. Suddenly they are cast into the light of beauty on a cosmic scale, bathed in the “glow” of “two enormous stars”; the contemporary reader is tempted to summon to mind one of Terrence Malick’s glorious ‘magic-hour’ shots, which serve, in his films, to make a similar analogy between love and natural beauty.162 The aestheticization of her love becomes a powerful counter-argument against two distinct moral scruples – eroticism and adultery. By

162 See, for example, the various scenes of pretty women twirling in the sunlight that feature in his most recent film, To the Wonder (2012) or his Gesamtkuntswerk Tree of Life (2011).

171 reversing the negative polarity of these discourses, the narrator reconfigures her erotic, adulterous love as an alternative moral truth engaged in brave resistance against the impersonal brutality of the “unbelievers” and their institutions.

The most emblematic confrontation between these two orders of being is the climactic scene of interrogation at the Arizona border, where the narrator responds to the police officer’s questions with lines from The Song of Solomon:

What relation is this man to you? (My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lillies.) How long have you known him? (I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lillies.) Did you sleep in the same room? (Behold thou art fair, my love, behold thou art fair: thou hast dove’s eyes.) [...] (47)

The scene of forced confession stands as a metonym for the enforcement of social norms, the brutality of which is positioned against the beauty of The Song of Solomon. The clash between these two orders of being is embodied in the juxtaposition of the interrogator’s questions, with their harsh, pared-down sentences, against the flowing lyricism and imagism of The Song. The officer’s questions, with their standard subject-verb-object syntactical arrangement, are meant to elicit the logistical details of the affair. Given the novel’s resistance to such instrumental reason, it is not surprising that Smart chooses this moment to insert whole passages from the Song in the place of the technical details the officer is seeking. However, it is worth pointing out that the choice to enclose the narrator’s responses in parentheses produces a kind of referential instability: it is not clear to the reader whether we are really meant to regard these as the responses spoken aloud by the character at the time of the interrogation, or whether they have been strategically positioned after the fact as a means of covering up the prosaic details of her confession. Laurent Jenny provides a helpful vocabulary in this regard: in his famous essay “La

172 stratégie de la forme” (1967), he distinguishes between two different usages of intertextual fragments. In the one, “isotopie métaphorique,” a fragment from one text is inserted into another to establish an analogous or metaphorical relation between the two. In the other, “isotopie métonymique,” the fragment is actually part of the narrative and is inserted as such to further the plot, as in the case of a letter one character writes to another. In this instance, therefore, the question is whether the lines from The Song of Solomon are functioning metaphorically or metonymically.

The question of whether The Song functions as metaphor or metonymy is in part resolved by the police officer’s conclusion that “the girl’s a religious maniac” (49). Clearly, whether or not she actually quoted the lines given parenthetically, the narrator has been using some form of religious rhetoric with the officer. Her quotation is therefore not merely metaphorical, but actually corresponds to some kind of empirical reality in the world of the text. As a result, the police officer is led to regard her responses to his questions as non-sequiturs, as would a reader who considered only the surface-level meaning of her words. Indeed, the surface logic grows increasingly tenuous as the interrogation proceeds. In response to his first question about their relationship, the narrator offers a response that, while poetic, at least touches on the topic of relationality: “My beloved is mine and I am his” (47). Her responses subsequently bear less and less relation to the original question, to the point where a query regarding their sexual relations is answered by a description of the lover’s “dove’s eyes” (47).

Whereas the police officer cannot parse her logic, the seeming incommensurability of her responses is, for the reader, a fully intelligible articulation of her protest against the normative conventions of society. They represent her refusal to temper the heroic terms of her love for what

Robert McGill calls “a reductively literal view of the world” (2007: 80). When she is finally released into the care of a family friend, this latter accuses her of having “antagonized them”

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(51): “‘You should have buttered them up, jollied them along’” (52), he admonishes her, to which the narrator protests, “‘But they brought in the nature of Truth’” (52). Because, for the narrator, Truth resides in the discourse of beauty and love, her answers are, according to this logic, the only replies possible. The narrator opposes this Truth to “[t]he truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” that is forcibly extracted from her “in the hour of my extremity and after ten hours’ questioning” (49). The narrator’s assertion that the couple was imprisoned “[f]or too much love, only for too much love” (51) confirms the incompatibility of their love with the prevailing order, as well as her insistence that she occupies the moral high ground. Against the laws of the state, the narrator offers the alternative ‘laws of love’, whose demands overtly contradict social morays. When her lover returns to his wife, he commits “the one sin which

Love will not allow”: “The police, domestic scenes, cooling friends, the bribed provincial cops, the sordidness of hotels, were powerless, but love has other laws, whose infringement, even by a slight trespass, is punished without trial” (84). The narrator makes two distinct arguments here: first, that to return to his wife is a moral violation, a “sin” against love, and second, that it is a legal transgression, an affront to the “laws” of love. She makes use of precisely the terms that have been levelled against her, yoking them into the service of a Truth that exceeds the mundane

“truth” of worldly authority.

In addition to the sense of moral righteousness that inhibits the narrator’s guilt, she also divests herself of feelings of wrongdoing by abdicating responsibility for her actions, blaming them on forces outside of her control. Her logic is somewhat contradictory given her insistence, as detailed above, upon the rightness of her decisions. From the outset, the narrator personifies nature as a “perpetual whore” (18) whose “long days seduce all thoughts away” (19). Before the start of her affair, she finds herself surrounded by a world infused with dangerous eroticism: “the kelp in amorous coils” which “appear to pin down the Pacific” (19); the hill that “turns from the

174 sea and goes into the secrecy and damp air of forbidden things” (21); the enormous trees that

“forbode disaster by their beauty, built on too grand a scale” (18). The “disaster” is, of course, a fated love affair “from which I cannot escape” (22). The narrator uses a variety of metaphors to convey this sense of inescapability: “the poison has got into my blood” (22); “the future is already done” (22); “It is written. Nothing can escape” (22); “Necessity supplies no velvet wing with which to escape” (23); “[he] gave me what I could no more refuse than the earth can refuse the rain” (24); “Jupiter has been with Leda [...] and now nothing can avert the Trojan wars” (25);

“The trap is sprung, and I am in the trap” (32); “The sand of catastrophe is loosed” (33); “I am possessed by love and have no options” (39). Through the repeated use of the passive voice, the narrator abdicates responsibility for the affair, blaming it instead on a conspiracy of mythic proportions. The reference to the Roman/Greek myth of Jupiter and Leda is particularly instructive: Jupiter (or Zeus, for the Greeks), chief among the gods, fell so in love with Leda,

Queen of Sparta, that he transformed himself into a beautiful swan and either seduced or raped her, depending on the account. Their coupling produced four children, including Helen, whose legendary beauty would launch the Trojan wars. The narrator’s identification with Leda aligns her with one of history’s famous victims, who, unlike other targets of the gods’ passions, proved unable to escape. The narrator constrasts Leda’s fate to that of “[l]ucky Daphne” and “[l]ucky

Syrinx” (22), both of whom were able to escape their pursuers by praying for assistance: Syrinx evaded Pan’s advances by being transformed into hollow water reeds, and Daphne eluded Apollo by metamorphosing into a laurel tree. Unlike these “lucky” women, however, the narrator has no choice but to fulfil her terrible fate. Not only is she blameless owing to the rightness of her actions, she is moreover a victim of the cruel fates that seal her destiny.

When the narrator is ultimately abandoned by her lover, her imagery of victimhood moves from the pagan to the Christian as she becomes a ‘martyr’ to love. “He has martyred me”

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(86) she states, bemoaning love “crucified on a floating cross” (107). However, whereas Christ’s crucifixion lasted “only three days” (86), her suffering is far worse, for its duration is indeterminate. The comparison to Christ is undeniably the pinnacle of the narrator’s “apologia for ‘passion’” (Frojendahl, 2004). Frojendahl makes the important point that Smart’s view of passion hearkens back to the Middle Ages, when the term meant “‘suffering’ or ‘affliction’ in the theological sense” (2004), before its transformation, in the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, into a term describing “sexual desire and emotion” (2004). Etymologically, the word “passion” is traceable back to the passive participle of the Latin passio, meaning “suffering” (Online

Etymology Dictionary). Smart’s account plays on precisely this double nature of passion as both active and passive: although the narrator’s love affair is elsewhere depicted as beautiful and pleasurable, by the novel’s end it is clear to what extent it is a condition that is imposed from without, and furthermore, one whose vicissitudes must be endured. Her self-identification with

Christ positions her as the ultimate victim, destined to suffer “for too much love” (51).

The narrator’s identification with Christ can only be taken so far, however, as whereas he endured his crucifixion for the redemption of mankind, she, by contrast, refuses to resign herself to her suffering: “I cannot be a female saint” (97), she declares. The novel’s final section opens with a powerful denunciation of the “mechanical motions of existence” (103), framed in the

Biblical language of Psalm 137, from which the novel derives its title:

By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept. I will not be placated by the mechanical motions of existence, nor find consolation in the solicitude of waiters who notice my devastated face. [...] They say as we grow older we embrace resignation. But O, they totter into it blind and unprotesting. And from their sin, the sin of accepting such a pimp to death, there is no redemption. It is the sin of damnation. (103)

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The narrator turns Christ’s virtue on its head, recasting his acceptance as a “sin.” Her rhetorical mastery is evident in her use of Psalm 137 as support for this claim: the psalm expresses the despair of the exiled Israelites as they remember the Holy Land and pray for deliverance. It opens with the very passage Smart adapts for her purposes: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion” (1). This intertext allows the narrator to connect her refusal to accept her fate with the oppression, as well as the tenacity, of God’s

‘chosen people.’ If she cannot be a stoic Christian martyr, she will locate her iconography of victimhood elsewhere, in the vocal lament of the Israelites. Additionally, the conclusion of “The

Song of Solomon” provides another important intertext, with its assertion that “love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame” (8.6). The narrator’s torment is consistent with the “vehement flame” of jealousy described in the Biblical text, a fact that legitimates its viability as a possible response to her circumstances. It is not unfair to suggest that she approaches her suffering with the same zeal as her passion: even at her lowest, abandoned at Grand Central Station pregnant and weeping, she affirms that “[t]he pain was unendurable, but I did not want it to end: it had operatic grandeur” (103). This “grandeur” is preferable to the alternative, avowedly sinful, embrace of resignation. It likewise stands in sharp contrast with the imagery of the benevolent,

Marian wife, who impassively accepts her betrayal. It thus might not be such a stretch to state that Smart’s use of predominantly Old Testament imagery signals her identification with its thunderous, vengeful God, over the subdued, forgiving Christ of the New Testament. Though she chooses one holy text over another, Smart’s iconography never wavers from the Biblical, a fact that emphasizes the narrator’s desire to be understood by society rather than to break with it completely. Although readmission into the community is one of the postulates of a standard confession, it must be pointed out that it generally occurs as a result of penance. Given the

177 narrator’s insistence that she will “[ask] no one’s forgiveness for sins I refuse to recognize” (56), however, another strategy for achieving acceptance is warranted: namely, the seduction of the reader through felicitous language. The novel establishes its own moral system and measures all actions against its own idiosyncratic yardstick, an equation in which the narrator “can’t miss”

(112). Even her desertion by her lover becomes the occasion for a reaffirmation of her perspicacity against the normalizing forces of society.

The novel’s closing image embodies the same incommensurability of the heroic and the mundane that appears throughout the text, but a clear shift is perceptible in its rhetoric. The narrator witnesses the “darkie porters” arriving at Grand Central Station to “usher in the day with brooms and enormous dustpans. Odours of disinfectant wipe out love and tears” (112). Suddenly, the mundane world expands to proportions vastly larger than the narrator’s love. Smart’s dry humour is on display in the reduction of the enormity of the narrator’s lamentation to a speck of dirt to be wiped out by a menial labourer: the “enormous dustpans” synecdochically dwarf the narrator within their towering shadow. Perhaps it is the perspective granted through deep suffering that allows the narrator to regard herself with almost ironic critical distance. This distance is emphasized in the contrast between the easy clean-up of “love and tears” and its

Biblical intertext, The Song of Solomon’s closing affirmation that “many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it” (8.7). Against the hyperbolic rhetoric of the source text, the narrator positions a newfound sobriety; this marks the first time the narrator uses the intertext to reduce, rather than amplify, the dimensions of her love. However, this new perspective does not have the effect of invalidating the grandiose rhetoric of the previous hundred pages. Instead, it functions as a wink to the reader, a sly signal that she is a masterful rhetorician rather than “a religious maniac,” as she was accused of being by the border officer. To an extent, her ability to switch perspectives does cast doubt on the sincerity of her confession, as it calls into question the

178 transcendent “authority” (Sullivan, 1991: 173) vested upon her as the prophet of love. However, so complete is the narrator’s seduction, so utterly absorbed is the reader into the narrator’s world, that her ironic commentary on the easy erasure of love becomes simply more confirmation of her authority, the expression of a kind of omniscience that allows her to don and remove the mantle of love’s prophet at will. Although the cold reality of the mundane has won a temporary victory over love, this is surely not the final battle; that the novel ends with a question suggests that the possibility of a revival is still very much alive.

Through an elaborate process of seduction, the narrator of By Grand Central Station lures its reader into accepting the terms of her confession. We are invited into a world where beauty, the supreme virtue, is attended by her handmaiden, love. The strategies of justification are shifting and contradictory: an adulterous affair is cast by turns as a heroic undertaking, bravely faced in spite of the great danger it poses, and then subsequently as an inescapable fate that cannot be circumvented. Sometimes, the narrator possesses the agency of a Macbeth; at other times, she figures herself as the ravaged Leda. Both the literary and the religious forms of confessional speech are present in the novel. Its first-person narration and disclosure of personal information invite the reader to participate in its intimacy. At the same time, the repeated self- recriminations and implorations to be absolved suggest the presence of a desire to perform the speech act in its religious inflection, and thus to be pardoned for the transgression of having stolen another woman’s husband. Over the course of the novel, however, it becomes clear that the professed desire to be forgiven is really secondary to the narrator’s primary aim, which is to convince the reader that, in fact, the beauty of her love trumps petty, restrictive social morays.

The cruelty she experiences at the hands of the border police comes to emblematize society’s intolerance more generally. The forced confession she is compelled to make in this scene illustrates precisely Foucault’s critique of confessional speech as an instrument of repression; the

179 confession Smart develops over the course of her novel, by contrast, demonstrates how confessional speech, if used creatively, can actually function as a powerful challenge to social morays.163

Conclusion

Although The Martyrology and By Grand Central Station are formally and thematically very different texts, it is instructive to consider them together as examples of a kind of sincerity that nevertheless challenges the norms of the confessional mode. Both use a religious vocabulary as a means of endorsing their world view: for Nichol, addressing himself to a God, albeit a continually-shifting God, is a way of channeling his feeling of the sacred dimension of the world.

That his poetic praxis resulted in the ‘discovery’ of a pantheon of Saints hidden in language is not surprising, given his belief in the spiritual power that can be unlocked when language is broken up into its semantic, graphemic, and even sonic, components. In addition to the religious dimension of his work, Nichol’s confessional practice is somewhat reminiscent of that of the

Confessional poets in terms of his willingness to lay bare excerpts from his own biography.

However, the incorporation of even the most painful memories into a ludic literary exercise suggests that his project goes beyond defying the Eliotic mandate that poetry be impersonal. His referential play corresponds to a radical project of deconstructing the self as well as the

163 While Smart’s success in seducing her reader must be celebrated insofar as it represents a challenge to the levelling forces of social normativity, it must at the same time give the reader pause. The legitimacy of appropriating another woman’s husband is, regardless of one’s adherence to social norms, questionable. It is perhaps wise at this juncture to reflect that an unstable confession does not an ethical confession make. Consider the opening statement of Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, who uses a religious rhetoric not unlike that of Smart’s narrator: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he writes from his prison-cell, “exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns” ([1955] 1997: 9). What follows is, of course, a very compelling confession of his ‘seduction’ (or, as it were, statutory rape) of the “girl-child” Lolita ([1955] 1997: 9). As Paul de Man so astutely points out in his discussion of Rousseau, the contrived confession can serve the nefarious purpose of excusing one’s actions rather than atoning for them, and it is essential to be attuned to its latent potential to manipulate.

180 entrenched modes of experience in which it has become entrapped. Against the Foucauldian alliance between confession and the enactment of social norms, Nichol’s confessional practice seeks to break free of linguistic convention and, by extension, to open up new avenues for intersubjective experience in the world.

Like Nichol, Smart uses biblical intertexts not as a means of exposing religion’s dogmatic normativity, as did the writers discussed in the previous chapter, but rather to legitimate the heroic depiction of her love affair. Reframing her adulterous relationship in religious terms,

Smart’s narrator develops an idiosyncratic moral system in which beauty comes to occupy the preeminent role. She uses a variety of rhetorical strategies to seduce her reader into her world, where the power of her love trumps the pettiness of her detractors. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, an instance of forced confession is contained within the larger confessional framework of the narrative as a whole: here, the scene of interrogation at the Arizona border, with its juxtaposition of the police officer’s harsh questions against the evocative poeticism of The Song of Solomon, serves as the ultimate symbol for the narrator’s fight against convention. Her unwillingness, in this scene, to temper the heroic grandeur of her relationship to the strictures of the bureaucratic machine corresponds to a transcendent vision not unlike Nichol’s. Both writers use a religious vocabulary to position the transcendence of the numinous above the ossified institutions of society.

Rather than take aim at repressive morays directly as Atwood and Tremblay do – a critical orientation that rests on a certain rhetorical violence – the confessional rhetoric of Nichol and Smart works more pacifically to build a space for the articulation of their utopian visions.

Arguably, they thus posit a possible return to the origins of confession, a time before “‘Know thyself’ [...] obscured ‘Take care of thyself’” (Foucault, 1988: 22) as its modus operandi.

Foucault attributes the shift to a cultural “morality of asceticism” that “insists that the self is that

181 which one can reject” (1988: 22). Paradoxically, the very techniques that problematize the autobiographical reading of either text—the fracturing of the subject, the lack of referential precision, the outright denial of biographical correspondence—can thus be regarded as strategies by which the writer embraces him or herself. Nichol fuses confession with deconstructive language play to connect himself to “some other, higher, life” (6); the “miracle” (40) of Smart’s love transpires somewhere between the reality of her actions and the shape she gives them through language. Confession is also the means by which these writers negotiate grief, be it the death of a child or the desertion of a lover. In addition to its overtly critical potential, then, the texts considered in this chapter demonstrate another, equally important, dimension of confessional discourse: namely, its capacity to serve as a technique of self-care.

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Chapter 4 The Impossible Confession of Madness: Louise Bouchard’s Les images and Normand Chaurette’s Provincetown Playhouse, juillet 1919, j’avais 19 ans

Introduction to Chapter 4: Can Madness Speak?

Discussing the depiction of madness as a female strategy of resistance against patriarchy,

Miranda Sherwin identifies a paradox: the act of confessing madness stands in seeming opposition to the content of the disclosure. This ostensible contradiction is particularly salient in texts that are structured as autobiographies, which elicit the following query: “how can one trust the ‘truths’ told by a madwoman?” (Sherwin, 2011: 110). This is the same question that must be asked of Louise Bouchard’s Les images (1985) and Normand Chaurette’s Provincetown

Playhouse, juillet 1919, j’avais 19 ans164 (1981), two texts that, while not autobiographical per se, are presented as the intimate communications of their respective speakers: one takes the form of a letter, the other ostensibly occurs in the mind of its main character. It is a particularly pertinent line of investigation given Foucault’s characterization of confession as “une des techniques les plus hautement valorisées pour produire le vrai” (1976: 79).165 If the purpose of confession, insidious or overt, is to produce truths about the self, what does it mean for a madman/madwoman to confess? What kind of truth is [s]he capable of producing, and how do we as readers receive his/her confession?

A reoccurring debate within twentieth-century criticism is whether or not madness is able to “tell its own story” (Sherwin, 2011: 110). In their canonical text The Madwoman in the Attic

164 From this point on, I will refer to this work simply as Provincetown Playhouse. 165 “one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth” ([1978] 1990: 58).

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(1979), for example, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argued that in Victorian literature, madness is usually confined to the margins rather than given a voice. The “ghost” that haunts Thornfield

Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, to name perhaps the most famous case, is ultimately revealed to be Rochester’s mad wife, Bertha Mason, who has been locked away in the attic. The madwoman’s perspective is absent from the narrative, as she functions primarily as an antagonistic signifier within the world of the sane characters: Gilbert and Gubar characterize her as a “shadow” or “double” (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979: 80) of the protagonist, whose radical departure from the norms of society enacts the rebellion unavailable to the heroine, and by extension, to the writer herself. When Victorian women write about madness, they are really expressing their “own self-division, their desire both to accept the strictures of patriarchal society and to reject them” (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979: 78). For Gilbert and Gubar, the silencing of madness functions primarily as a metaphor for a broader cultural policing of gender roles.

While Gilbert and Gubar are interested specifically in its feminist implications, the relegation of mad characters to Victorian attics can be regarded as representative of a more general cultural rejection of madness. In his landmark study Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique

(1972) (Madness and Civilization ([1965] 1988)), Foucault argues that the banishment of madness from society can be traced directly back to the year 1657, when the founding of the

Hôpital général in Paris inaugurated what he terms “le grand renfermement” (1972: 56).166 It is at this moment that the perception of madness shifted: no longer a part of society, it became an undesirable element that had to be cordoned off from it. With the mad reduced to the “silence”

(Foucault, 1972: 56) of the institution, their voices were gradually replaced by those speaking about madness, including the discourse of psychiatry, which Foucault disparagingly

166 “the great confinement” ([1965] 1988: xii).

184 characterizes as a “monologue de la raison sur la folie” (Foucault, 1961).167 The very same institution that compels individuals to conform to society’s norms likewise determines who is excluded from the community altogether. Foucault regards his “archéologie de ce silence”

(1961)168 as an attempt to give a voice back to madness, to allow it to speak.

In literature, it would seem that a similar attempt to allow madness to speak is embodied in a text such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea ([1966] 2000), a postcolonial ‘prequel’ to Jane

Eyre that is mainly written from Bertha’s point of view. One could argue that Rhys’s text presents a more ethical approach to madness insofar as it attempts to give Bertha a voice by focusing on the material conditions that resulted in her marginalization. Derrida, however, would argue otherwise. For him, even a text that aims to give a voice to the voiceless can only ever be complicit in the erasure it is ostensibly correcting. In his essay “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” he takes direct aim at Foucault: while he is in some respects sympathetic to the project of his former teacher, he accuses his archaeological method of participating in the very tradition of writing reasonably about madness that Foucault is attempting to critique. “On ne peut sans doute pas

écrire une histoire, voire une archéologie contre la raison,” Derrida argues, “car, malgré les apparences, le concept d’histoire a toujours été un concept rationnel” (1967b: 59).169 All writing is necessarily bound up in the logos of rationality, a paradigm from which it cannot escape: as

Derrida poetically phrases it, “Il n’y a pas de cheval de Troie dont n’ait raison la Raison (en général)” (1967b: 58).170 While this critique applies most directly to Foucault’s argument, its implications putatively extend to all written texts. Thus, madness in literature is “a construct

167 “a monologue of reason about madness” ([1965] 1988: xi). 168 “archaeology of that silence” ([1964] 1988: xi). 169 “A history, that is, an archaeology against reason doubtless cannot be written, for, despite all appearances to the contrary, the concept of history has always been a rational one” (1978: 36). 170 “There is no Trojan horse unconquerable by reason (in general)” (1978: 36).

185 from within the domain of reason, not because the authors were sane but because [their works] signify madness within an ordered dramatic scheme” (Salkeld, 1993: 40).

While the applicability of Derrida’s critique is to a certain extent diminished by the incontrovertible fact that madness does in practice “[manage] both to find a voice and to produce texts about its condition” (Sherwin, 2011: 101), its stakes are worthy of serious consideration, particularly in the case of women writers. According to Derrida, any text that attempts to engage with madness is complicit in silencing the real voices of the mad. This complicity is problematic, because many feminist writers who create mad characters are legitimately invested in the etiology of madness as it emerges from the structures of patriarchy. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example, wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a denunciation of the rest cure she had been prescribed by one Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. The story, written as the clandestine journal of a woman confined to bed rest by her doctor-husband, parallels the writer’s own experience. After following the doctor’s advice that she “‘live as domestic a life as far as possible’,” “‘have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never touch pen, brush, or pencil again,” she reported,

“[I] came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over” (Gilman, 1913). In response to critics whose sensibilities were offended by her unseemly depiction of madness, she wrote, “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked” (1913).

Whereas Gilman understands her confessional practice as a form of resistance, Derrida would argue that her story nevertheless remains inscribed within the domain of reason: “Le malheur des fous,” he writes, “[...] c’est que leurs meilleurs porte-parole sont ceux qui les trahissent le mieux; c’est que, quand on veut dire leur silence lui-même, on est déjà passé à l’ennemi et du côté de l’ordre, même si, dans l’ordre, on se bat contre l’ordre et si on le met en

186 question dans son origine” (1967b: 58).171 As he sees it, there are only two possible correctives to this erasure: “[o]u bien se taire d’un certain silence [...], ou bien suivre le fou dans le chemin de son exil” (1967b: 58).172 Derrida places the writer in a double bind: he can choose either to refrain from confessing madness at all, in which case the madman’s integrity is preserved but he remains voiceless, or, alternatively, he can go mad himself and thus fall silent.

Derrida’s conclusion is particularly incompatible with the aim of feminist writing, which is, according to Rita Felski, to represent “the diversity, but also the communality of women’s lives, as exemplified in their experience of marginalization and oppression in social and cultural domains” (1989: 45). This is particularly true of writers operating in the confessional mode such as Gilman and the Confessional Poets (Plath, Sexton), for whom writing about mental illness serves both documentary and contestatory functions. If Miranda Sherwin is right in stating that the confession of madness “provides a space in which patriarchal […] discourses can be appropriated and subverted” (Sherwin, 2011: 110), it is clear that a refutation of Derrida’s argument is a necessary precondition for the substantiation of her claim. While Sherwin does not take Derrida into account, Shoshana Felman’s analysis of the latent assumptions in Derrida’s own thesis provides a good starting point for the reclamation of confessional narratives of madness. In a brilliant rhetorical move, Felman turns deconstruction against its creator. She points out that Derrida never defines the term madness, but rather relies on examples from literature to elucidate the concept: for example, he opens “Cogito and the History of Madness” with two epigraphs, one from Kierkegaard and the other from Joyce. Shifting the emphasis from his rhetoric to his praxis, Felman points out that he, like Foucault, creates “une zone littéraire

171 “The misfortune of the mad [...] is that their best spokesmen are those who betray them best; which is to say that when one attempts to convey their silence itself, one has already passed over to the side of the enemy, the side of order, even if one fights against order from within it, putting its origin into question” (1978: 36). 172 “[e]ither do not mention a certain silence [...] or follow the madman down the road of his exile” (1978: 36).

187 entre pensée et folie” (Felman, 1978: 48).173 In literature, Felman sees the possible reconciliation of the “discours sur la folie” (1978: 347) and “un discours de la folie” (1978: 347)174; in opposition to the ‘silence’ of which Foucault and Derrida speak, Felman finds in fiction “une folie qui parle, une folie qui se joue toute seule à travers le langage mais sans que personne ne puisse devenir le sujet parlant de ce qui se joue” (1978: 347).175 In other words, madness does appear in literature, but not where we are expecting to find it: against a proscriptive definition of madness such as that offered by Lilian Feder,176 Felman proposes that we embrace instead a polyvalent signifier that changes with each text (Felman, 1979:74 [264]). Madness is not the other to rationality, as Derrida maintains, but “l’excèdent” (1978: 51),177 a “mouvement de jeu linguistique intotalisable, immaîtrisable” (1978: 347),178 “une irréductible résistance de la chose

à l’interprétation” (1978: 349).179 Instead of dwelling on the superficial depiction of madness,

Felman counsels that we excavate the text to uncover more fundamental moments of madness lurking beneath the veneer of structural coherence.

The most concrete way to engage with Felman’s complex treatment of madness is to consider Writing and Madness (1978) as a counterpoint to her account of seduction (discussed in the previous chapter) in La folie et la chose littéraire (1978). If seduction “c’est produire un

173 “a literary buffer zone between madness and thought” (Felman, 2003: 48). 174 “the discourse on madness” and the “discourse of madness.” 175 “a madness that speaks, a madness that is acted out in language, but whose role no speaking subject can assume” (Felman, 2003, 252). 176 Feder defines madness “as a state in which unconscious processes predominate over conscious ones to the extent that they control them and determine perceptions of and responses to experience that, judged by prevailing standards of logical thought and relevant emotion, are confused and inappropriate” (1980: 5). 177 “an overflow “ (2003: 51). 178 “movement of non-totalizable, ungovernable linguistic play” (Felman, 2003: 252). 179 “an irreducible resistance to interpretation” (Felman, 2003: 254).

188 langage heureux” (Felman, 1980: 35),180 the “folie de la rhétorique,” by contrast, emerges in “ce mouvement de jeu qui déjoue le sens et par lequel l’énoncé s’aliène à la performance textuelle”

(1978: 347-348).181 Felman is specifically interested in the way the attempt to discuss madness inevitably results in a series of deferrals and infelicitous speech acts that are in themselves constitutive of the very madness seemingly disavowed by the text’s logical structure. Whereas

Derrida regards this structure as proof of the author’s complicity with a rationalist regime,

Felman uses Derrida’s own tactic of deconstruction to foreground moments where order is ruptured. A restrospective glance at the texts considered in the previous chapters reveals many of these ‘mad’ moments, when a character’s confession misfires such that it undermines the premise on which it rests. The Handmaid’s Tale is particularly rife with such instances, many stemming from the uncertainty we as readers experience regarding the medium of Offred’s confession. The conceit of the novel, as we discover at its end, is that it is a transcription of audiotapes discovered stashed in a locker. Nevertheless, throughout the text, the protagonist makes statements that seemingly contradict the very premise of the novel: “When I get out of here, if I’m ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove” (Atwood 168-169), she tells us. This statement is illogical given that the very possibility of our hearing Offred’s words is predicated on her having ‘gotten out’ and ‘set down’ her confession. The attention she draws to the mediated nature of communication compels us to cast a critical gaze on the novel as a whole, itself infelicitously reconstructed such that the reader can never find a firm footing within the world of the text. How can we be hearing Offred’s confession, we must ask ourselves, if the very

180 “is to produce felicitous language” (Felman, 1983: 28). 181 “madness of rhetoric”; “ungovernable linguistic play, through which meaning misfires and the text’s statement is estranged from its performance” (Felman, 2003: 252).

189 content of her confession is a denial that she is making it in the first place? Rather than undermine the integrity of Atwood’s authorial vision, my contention is that this impenetrability is deliberately built into the text as a means of self-consciously resisting the reader’s gaze and thus formally enacting the text’s politics. It is a “livre impossible” [impossible book], Felman’s term for a work whose content is at odds with its premise (1978: 64/ 2003: 62). A similar contradiction occurs in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which ends with the narrator rationally reporting that, having fully succumbed to madness, she has been reduced to “creeping” around the room like an animal ([1892] 2006: 53). In both of these texts, the articulation of madness rests on an impossibility that eludes the reader’s desire for narrative closure. Both Louise

Bouchard and Normand Chaurette thwart this same desire in Les images and Provincetown

Playhouse, ‘impossible books’ whose moments of rupture and infelicity occasion the possibility of meaningful social critique.

Les images: Introduction

Les images, the first novel by Québécois writer Louise Bouchard,182 was published in 1985, the same year as The Handmaid’s Tale. Both works deal with the effect of patriarchal authority on a woman’s subjectivity. However, where Atwood goes into considerable detail to convey the parameters of the totalitarian regime under which her character lives, Bouchard’s text dwells far more extensively on the inner life of her protagonist (what Barbara Havercroft refers to as her

182 Les images was a finalist for a Governor General’s Literary Award in 1985. Bouchard’s second novel, published in 1996, is entitled Décalage vers le bleu. Bouchard has also published several volumes of poetry, including Des voix la même (1978), and the award-winning L’inséparable (1989) and Entre les mondes (2007). Although her work has received critical acclaim, surprisingly little scholarship exists on Bouchard’s oeuvre.

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“traversée intérieure douloreuse” [1999: 177]).183 As Havercroft rightly observes, this interiority entails a “chronologie perturbée” (1999: 178)184: events are not necessarily presented in linear sequence, but follow a logic of correspondence akin to a dream or word-association (Havercroft,

1999: 178). Generically speaking, it is difficult to fit Les images into any discrete category: while the Herbes Rouges edition informs the reader that it is a roman (novel), this designation is likely more attributable to marketability than style.185 In broad strokes, the narrative, which takes the form of a letter from the narrator (who calls herself Isaac) to her friend Théodore, depicts the inner life of a woman coping with a variety of mental afflictions, among them an acute fear of death, an obsession with images of suffering and sacrifice, a diffuse, intense, anxiety, and a host of other disturbances. The text also details the complex relationship between Isaac and her friend/mentor Dorothée. Isaac is extremely reliant on Dorothée, whom she for a long time considers her only lifeline: periodically, she retreats into a specially-prepared dark room the latter maintains for her in her house (23). No matter how much attention Dorothée bestows upon her, however, Isaac is never able to shake her fear of abandonment. Eventually, Dorothée gets sick, and it is only then that the narrator begins to realize that she must learn to live independently. Isaac’s story ends on a somewhat optimistic note: we see her reaching out to a

183 “Painful interior journey.” With the exception of a brief sojourn in Denmark (birthplace of Kierkegaard, whose works and biography form an important intertext in Les images), the events physically take place in what is presumably Québec (although there are no precise indications to this effect). 184 “Disrupted chronology.” 185 It is worth pointing out that L’inséparable (1989), which is categorized as a work of poetry, contains many passages that could, from both a thematic and stylistic point of view, have been excerpted directly from her so-called novel. Like Isaac, the speaker of L’inséparable similarly feels excluded from discourse as from a human community. “La honte m’aguillone,” she writes; “Aurai-je un sursaut de révolte afin de revenir enfin revenir dans le monde et dans la langue des humains” (1989: 20). [“Shame gnaws at me. Will I have a shock of revolt in order to come back finally come back to the world and the language of humans.”] The correlation between the feelings of shame and alienation appears overtly in Les images, where the narrator wonders why she has been “condamnée à cette vie secrète, criminelle? Quelle est ma faute, que je doive sans cesse m’exprimer avec cette honte” (87-88). [“condemned to this secret, criminal, life? What is my fault, that I must ceaselessly express myself with this shame?”] Bouchard’s generic hybridity is an aesthetic strategy that is also a political intervention, as we will see presently.

191 neighbourhood girl who is ostensibly struggling with the same mental health issues she herself has been battling, thus offering her the same kind of mentorship she herself received from

Dorothée.

Les images as “Livre impossible”

The most “impossible” aspect of Les images is perhaps the very fact of our reading it. Like

Offred’s self-contradicting audiotapes, here we are presented with a letter that will never be sent.

In a reversal of Molly Bloom’s famously affirmative soliloquy which closes James Joyce’s

Ulysses,186 the narrator of Bouchard’s text, ‘Isaac’,187 exults in a series of negations: “et je pense, non, que je ne terminerai pas cette lettre; apres tout, non, je crois que je ne t’écririai pas”

(134-135).188 The reader’s sense of voyeurism, piqued by the intimate access to a letter meant exclusively for two people, is now further heightened by the revelation that, in fact, the letter is so private that it will never even be shared with its intended recipient, Théodore. This outcome is in many ways foreshadowed by the narrator’s statement on the first page of the text that its recipient is largely incidental to her purpose. “Je t’envoie quelques feuillets écrits en désespoir de cause,” she informs him; “Ne va pas croire surtout qu’ils te sont destinés.” (9).189 In Patricia

Smart’s view, the letter was intended “vraiment pour elle-même”190 all along; it is only at the

186 The famous closing words of this soliloquy, representing Molly’s affirmation of her sexuality and her relationship are “yes I said yes I will Yes” (Joyce, [1922] 1992: 933). 187 The narrator claims several names for herself throughout the text, each of which represents a distinct aspect of her self-definition. This nominal variation will be discussed in more detail below; for the sake of clarity, I will refer to the narrator simply as “Isaac” throughout this chapter. 188 “and I think, no, that I won’t finish this letter; no, I don’t believe I’ll write you after all” [All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated]. 189 “I’m sending you a couple of sheets written out of desperation; don’t go thinking that they’re meant mainly for you.” 190 “really for herself.”

192 story’s end, when she takes on the role “de guide et de mère”191 for her young neighbour, that she is able to “renonce à l’idée d’envoyer sa lettre”192 (Smart, 1986: 146). Her “non”s are in this sense affirmations of the accession to the status of self-sufficient agent she has been seeking throughout the narrative. At the same time, Isaac’s decision not to mail the letter193 reinforces the deconstructive premise of a text that, while announcing itself as epistolary, systematically undermines the reader’s expectations of the genre. The identity of the writer is unstable, the role and nature of the destinatee unclear, the purpose undecided, and the letter unsent. However, the goal of Les images is not to undercut the epistolary form per se, but rather to cast a critical gaze on the confessional discourse that the act of writing a letter engenders. While Isaac’s letter in some ways participates in an act of self-disclosure, I will demonstrate that it also deliberately resists the very gaze it invites. Although the text thematizes madness, the true ‘madness’ of the text, in Felman’s sense of the term, is created by its infelicitous confessional performance.

If, as has been established, the subversion of confession functions as social critique, an important target here is undeniably patriarchy: Barbara Havercroft is one of several critics who have read the text primarily as a “contestation féministe de l’homogénéité masculine de l’identité” (1999: 175).194 While this is certainly the case, scholars have unanimously overlooked the significance of Bouchard’s engagement with the question of madness, which, though certainly implicated in feminist identity politics, must also be regarded as a critical target unto

191 “of guide and mother.” 192 “give up the idea of sending her letter.” 193 Not only does Isaac decide not to mail the letter, her declaration that she will not even write Théodore, understood in its literal sense, can be interpreted as a further subversion of the text the reader has just finished reading. 194 “feminist contestation of the masculine homogeneity of identity.”

193 itself.195 Bouchard’s treatment of madness shares many of the goals of feminism insofar as draws attention to marginalized narratives. It likewise entails a stylistically radical aesthetic.

However, while Bouchard’s aesthetic is in some ways formally similar to écriture féminine,196

Hélène Cixous’s name for a writing that reflects and promotes feminine experience, the generic and syntactic disruptions of Les images challenge the very essentialism on which Cixous’s project rests.197 In her search for her identity, the narrator tries on both masculine and feminine identities, at one point stating, “Je ne suis pas une femme, je ne suis pas un homme, Théodore. Je suis cette chose hurlante, enfermée dans une bulle de verre” (114).198 Rather than reduce

Bouchard’s formal transgressions to a specifically feminine mode of writing, a concept Rita

Felski rightly argues “merely reaffirm[s] rather than question[s] the authority of gender stereotypes” (Felski, 1989: 27), we must instead regard them as Bouchard’s attempt to represent,

195 A. M. Gronhovd (1998), Barbara Havercroft (1999), and Patricia Smart (1986) have all read the text in terms of its explicitly feminist content rather than its intervention into the discourse of madness. 196 Cixous defines écriture féminine thus: “La féminité dans l’écriture je la sens passer d’abord par : un privilège de la voix : écriture et voix se tressent, se trament et s’échangent, continuité de l’écriture/rythme de la voix, se coupent le souffle, font haleter le texte ou le composent de suspens, de silences, l’aphonisent ou le déchirent de cris (Cixous, 1975: 107). [“First I sense femininity in writing by: a privileging of voice: writing and voice are entwined and interwoven and writing’s continuity/voice’s rhythm take each other’s breath away through interchanging, make the text gasp or form it out of suspenses and silences, make it lose its voice or rend it with cries” (1997: 98).] 197 Cixous’s call for a uniquely feminine writing has been variously celebrated by critics for its emancipatory potential and criticized for its own unacknowledged essentialism. As Toril Moi points out, “in her evocation of a specifically female writing she seems actively intent on promoting an utterly metaphysical case” regarding the essence of woman (1985: 113). A particularly objectionable fundament of her theory is the assertion that the basis for feminine reclamation begins with the acknowledgment of different sexual experience not centred around the phallus. Much scholarly debate has raged around the question of whether or not women really do experience the world in a different way, and if they do, whether this vantage is on the one hand, shared, and on the other, a potential starting point for political emancipation. Cixous has been accused by critics such as Toril Moi (1985), Morag Schiach (1991) and Domna Stanton (1989), among others, of promoting too essentialized a view of woman, which has portrayed her as a particular type of embodied subject rather than the multiple, irreducible, heterogeneity suggested elsewhere in Cixous’s own writing. This biological essentialism is echoed in the writers who take nearly literal inspiration from her injunction to write “à l’encre blanche” (“Rire” 44), i.e., from the biological effluence of the female body, as opposed to the traditional equation of pen-phallus. My contention is that Les images, while clearly engaged in a feminist identity politics, is primarily concerned with the deconstruction of essentialist accounts of subjectivity, including female subjectivity. While on the surface, the aesthetics of her fragmented writing conform very neatly to Cixous’s definition of écriture féminine, the spirit of her expression suggests that an epistemological framework must be sought elsewhere; I propose Shoshana Felman’s concept of the “impossible text” as a more generative tool for analysis. 198 “I’m not a woman, I’m not a man, Théodore. I’m that howling thing, imprisoned in a glass bubble.”

194 at the level of structure, the ineffable experience of feeling enclosed in a glass bubble, howling.

Fractured syntax, repetition, extreme intertextuality and a variety of literary devices thwart the expectation of transparency established by the text’s confessional premise. Isaac’s unreadable letter thus stages an ‘impossible’ confession, creating a space for the articulation of madness while resisting “le regard du voyeur” (Bouchard, 1989: 79)199 that reduces madness to silence.

As we have seen over the past several chapters, the substance of a confession is determined by the discursive position adopted by its speaker. “I intend to remind myself of my past foulnesses and carnal corruptions,” writes St. Augustine, “not because I love them but so that I may love you, my God” (II.i). Augustine’s dedication of the Confessions to the worship of

God prepares its reader for the teleological movement from sin to redemption. The text’s

“foulnesses and carnal corruptions” are contextualized as the past misdeeds of a speaker who has since become enlightened, fact that guarantees their didactic value (X.iii). Discursive positioning can also be consciously manipulated to achieve a desired effect, as Elizabeth Smart demonstrates in her self-identification as, alternatively, the hero and the victim of a drama imposed from without. The discursive position of the narrator of Les images, by contrast, is purposefully undecidable. The reader is prevented from determining whether she is writing from a state of madness, or at an experiential remove from it: is hers a mad confession, or a confession of madness? On several occasions, she explicitly correlates the act of writing with the experience of madness: “Quand j’écris une lettre,” she writes in the letter to her friend Théodore that serves as the frame narrative, “c’est que je suis au plus mal. Oui, lorsque je succombe au désir d’écrire, j’aborde la folie, son port, j’y entre” (10).200 Significantly, however, she is not referring in this

199 “gaze of the voyeur.” 200 “When I write a letter, it means that I’m at my worst. Yes, once I succumb to the desire to write, I approach madness’s port, I enter it.”

195 statement to the letter she is currently writing, i.e., the diegetic frame; rather, she is referring to a different, intradiegetic letter, addressed to her friend Dorothée, which she attempted to write the day before. The question for the reader becomes whether she has overcome yesterday’s madness, or whether she is still hovering at its threshold. Although she makes the connection between writing and madness, elsewhere she correlates her epistolary project with a movement toward healing: several pages later, Isaac asserts, “Il faut bien que j’écrive; il n’y a plus personne pour relater ma vie comme une histoire. [...] J’écris la deuxieme peur, pour la dépasser, lui survivre”

(21-22).201 By telling the story of her pathological fears, Isaac suggests that she is better able to deal with them. Writing again appears as a therapeutic technique in her account of a time when

Dorothée encouraged her to write the words she was too afflicted to speak: “Écris-le, disait-elle,

[...] écris-le, n’attends pas d’être dévastée” (50).202 Writing is thus revealed to be both the marker of madness and the means by which it is overcome; Barbara Havercroft refers to this double function as its “statut paradoxal” in the text (1999: 193). The paradoxical status of writing, as both “signe de souffrance” and “nécessaire pour éviter la folie” (Havercroft, 1999: 193-194),203 renders it impossible for the reader to determine whether Isaac’s confession emerges from a place of sanity, or whether her discourse remains tied to the illness it thematizes. Her rhetorical and syntactical pattern is inconsistent, moving in and out of standard hypotaxis. At times, her language assumes the rhythmic and rhetorical signifiers of madness. These moments are often accompanied by the irruption of the present tense into her largely past-tense narrative, and are usually marked by an appeal, in the second person, to an imagined interlocutor. They are also

201 “I must write; there’s nobody left to recount my life like a story. [...] “I write of the second fear in order to get past it, to survive it.” 202 “Write it, she would say, [...] write it, don’t wait to until you’re devastated.” 203 “sign of suffering” and “necessary to avoid madness.”

196 characterized by a reflection on death, whether her own or that of her biblical avatars, Isaac and

Jephte’s daughter.204 At other times, by contrast, she is acutely self-aware, as when she imagines

Théodore reading her letter and thinking to himself, “La pauvre, elle est complètement folle”

(79),205 or when she admits that she has embellished her story to elicit his “attention and sympathy” (67). The oscillation between these two modes prevents the reader from locating

Isaac’s discourse firmly inside or outside of madness.

The scene most representative of Isaac’s ambiguous discursive position is the “bal des ardents,” her account of an imaginary masked ball to which she invites famously crazy literary heroines, including Hamlet’s Ophelia and Catherine of Wuthering Heights (72-73). Getting ready to attend, Isaac clothes herself in the vestments of madness: she wears “[l]a folie autour de moi comme un manteau, comme une cape [...] [c]omme un voile” (72), “comme un masque” (73).206

These concatenating similes have an effect of amplification: what begins as a covering intensifies to become a form of concealment, disguising the fact that she is “nue dans l’agonie”

(72).207 She pleads Théodore not to strip her of her madness: “ne me dépouille pas,” she implores him, “[n]e me réveille pas de ma folie avant que je ne meure” (72).208 The likening of madness to a mask, coupled with the suggestion that it could be forcibly removed, indicate that

Isaac’s madness is, to a certain extent, a coping strategy that she has developed rather than an illness over which she has no control. While her imploration that Théodore not divest her of her

204 A representative example occurs early in the text: “La mort est devant mes yeux; je suis seule avec elle, en plein drame. Personne pour me dire ce qui arrive. Dors-tu Rose, dors-tu? Où est Isaac? Qu’as-tu fait d’elle?” (22). [“Death is in front of my eyes; I’m alone with her, in the middle of the action. Nobody to tell me what’s happening. Are you sleeping Rose, are you sleeping? Where is Isaac? What have you done with her?”] 205 “Poor girl, she is totally crazy.” 206 “madness around me, like a coat, like a cape. [...] Like a veil, like a mask.” 207 “naked in agony.” 208 “Don’t strip me, [...] don’t wake me from my madness before I die.”

197 madness at first appears to demonstrate how “the act of confessing can in itself increase the vulnerability of persons who expose their secrets” (Bok, 1984: 80), a closer inspection of her request reveals that it is impossible for another person to fulfil. If the standard confession

“increases the authority of the listener while decreasing that of the speaker” (Bok, 1984: 80),

Isaac’s request, by contrast, merely highlights the superfluity of her interlocutor, confirming

Patricia Smart’s contention that her true addressee is herself (1986: 146). By undermining the power of the interlocutor, the text challenges the characterization of madness as a disease to be diagnosed and corrected by an authority vested with the power to do so.

Another significant aspect of the “bal des ardents” is the concomitance of madness and logical exposition. In spite of its rhetoric of “hallucinatory inflation” (Felman, 2003: 67),209

Isaac’s visions are subtended by a logical thesis insofar as they serve to characterize madness as the product of patriarchal exclusion. The rational underpinning of her argument becomes clear as she segues directly into one of the many reflections on gender bias that punctuate her narrative.

In a hallucination (or perhaps a dream), she hears a voice that asks, “Qui es-tu? Réponds, c’est la question brûlante. Un fils ou une fille. Réponds. Si tu es un fils, tu peux dormir tranquille, tu vas revenir, comme l’enfant prodigue. [...] Mais les filles ne reviennent pas, Isaac, tu m’entends?”

(74).210 Isaac is here juxtaposing two biblical stories of human sacrifice with different outcomes: whereas Abraham’s son Isaac was saved by divine intervention, there was no such mercy for the unnamed daughter of Jephte.211 Like her, Ophelia and Catherine are victims of the masculine

209 Felman is not speaking directly of Bouchard’s text, but of Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia, a novel I believe is an important source of inspiration to Les images and one that will be discussed presently. 210 “Who are you? Answer: it’s the burning question. A son or a daughter. If you’re a son, you can rest easy, you will return, like the prodigal son. [...] But girls don’t return, do you hear me, Isaac?” 211 In the story of Isaac (Gen. 22: 1-19), God commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Abraham obeys God’s commandment, but at the moment he is about to strike his son, God instructs him to spare Isaac and sacrifice a ram instead. Because of his obedience, Abraham is blessed and it is prophesied that his descendants will be

198 economy that determines their fate.212 Tellingly, Isaac expels Ajax from the ball: although the hero of Sophocles’s eponymous tragedy meets a self-inflicted death, his madness was a temporary state vested on him by the gods.213 Isaac unsympathetically instructs him to ‘go throw himself on his sword’, seemingly equating the return of his reason with male privilege (73). In spite of what appears to be logical reasoning, however, the narrator continues throughout this scene to perform madness, incorporating her philosophical reflections into an increasingly frenzied, disjointed litany: “Ah! […] Je rêve, ma vie est sacrée. Je suis Isaac. […] Je ne veux pas mourir. Je ne veux pas périr comme Ajax en plein jour. Je suis Isaac. [...] Ah! c’est trop tard.

L’ange n’a pas arrêté sa main. Au secours! Dorothée, où es-tu? Je suis Isaac. Au secours!”

(75).214 Choppy sentences, repetition, a heightened fear of death and direct addresses to an absent interlocutor communicate an urgency that suggests her madness is more than a “mask” that she dons at will. Anne-Marie Grondhovd explains the coexistence of legitimate social critique alongside illogical ravings in causal terms: she suggests that Isaac’s madness is in fact

“numerous as the stars in the sky” (22:17). The story of Jephte’s daughter (Judges 11: 1-40) does not end as happily: in exchange for victory against the Ammonites, Jephte, a military leader, promises God that he will sacrifice the first living creature he beholds leaving his house upon his return. Unfortunately, Jephte’s daughter, his only child, is the first to run out to greet him; Jephte is forced to keep his vow, and his daughter, after spending two months in the mountains mourning her virginity, “die[s] unwed” (11: 38-40). 212 Ophelia’s descent into madness is a case in point, given that it can be traced to the loss of two male figures in her life: the death of her father, on the one hand, and her romantic rejection by Hamlet, on the other. Elaine Showalter recounts one notable performance in 1720, in which the former actress Susan Mountfort, “who had gone mad after her lover’s betrayal,” “escaped from her keeper, rushed to the theater, and just as the Ophelia of the evening was to enter for her mad scene, ‘sprang forward in her place ... with wild eyes and wavering motion.’ As a contemporary reported, ‘she was in truth Ophelia herself, to the amazement of the performers as well as of the audience—nature having made this last effort, her vital powers failed her and she died soon after’” (1985: 81-82). Although Catherine’s death is not explicitly precipitated by her frustrated love, her death giving birth to the child of a man more socially appropriate than her true heart’s desire is emblematic of the determining pressure of a repressive set of social morays. 213 Ajax was rendered temporarily mad by Athena, which leads him to slaughter a herd of sheep he believes is his enemies. Disgraced, Ajax commits suicide by throwing himself on his own sword. 214 “Oh! I’m dreaming, my life is sacred. I am Isaac. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to perish like Ajax, in broad daylight. I am Isaac [...] Oh! It’s too late. The angel didn’t stay his hand. Help! Dorothée, where are you? I am Isaac. Help!”

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“causé par une conscience aiguë de la réalité” (1998: 990).215 Grondhovd is right to draw attention to the fact that the narrator’s madness is not simply a break with reality, but actually a heightened sense of social injustice. However, her ascription of an etiology to the narrator’s madness is only a hypothesis that cannot be substantiated. A more nuanced reading of the text respects the deliberate impossibility of determining precisely from what discursive position Isaac speaks.

The stakes of the rhetorical undecidability of Isaac’s confession become clear when one compares it to Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia, a more or less autobiographical account of the author’s hallucinatory breaks with reality and a text on which Les images is clearly based.216 In her analysis of Aurélia, Shoshana Felman focuses on the simultaneous profession and deferral of madness with which Nerval introduces the diegesis: “Je vais essayer, [...] de transcrire les impressions d’une longue maladie qui s’est passée tout entière dans les mystères de mon esprit; -

- et je ne sais pourquoi je me sers de ce terme maladie, car jamais, quant à ce qui est de moi-

215 “caused by an acute awareness of reality.” 216 Bouchard is in fact an expert on Gérard de Nerval: her master’s thesis, completed at the Université de Montréal, is entitled Le fou et la morte/la folle et le mort: glose sur Aurélia, and her doctorate, Gérard de Nerval et les versions du rêve. Although a more sustained investigation into the indebtedness of Les images to Aurélia is clearly warranted, it is worth pointing out several common features. In addition to the general fact that both texts are narrated by a protagonist who has experienced madness, the two share very specific details, to the point that it is possible to argue that Bouchard’s representation of madness is modeled directly on Nerval’s text. The latter’s description of “les images qui se montrèrent tour à tour devant mes yeux” (1944: 59) [“the images which appeared, one after another, before my eyes” (1991: 52)] of course recalls Bouchard’s titular motif. Nerval’s injunction that, when afflicted, “c’est dans la pensée religieuse que l’on doit chercher des secours” (1944: 71) [“it is to religious thought that one must turn for succor” (1991: 62)] is both adopted and problematized by Isaac. Other similarities abound. Both narrators conceive of madness as an alternate reality that is accessed by a kind of portal: the “port” of madness that Isaac describes herself as entering (10) recalls Nerval’s “portes d’ivoire [...] qui nous séparent du monde invisible” (1944: 27) [“gates of ivory [...] that separate us from the invisible world” (1991: 25)]. Both describe a fixation with a particular number that portends death (December 23, in Les images [15] and the (unspecified) number of a house, in Aurélia [1944:30]). Both narratives are punctuated by a visit to a foreign country (although in Aurélia, the voyage occurs in the narrator’s afflicted mind). Additionally, the two texts display stylistic similarities, which, although it is beyond the scope of this project, a more sustained investigation of this topic would make explicit.

200 même, je ne me suis senti mieux pourtant” (Nerval, 1944: 27).217 Felman regards Nerval’s attempt to “dire la folie elle-même” (1978: 66)218 as “impossible” and yet “nécessaire” (1978:

64). While the narrative details its author’s descent into madness, his self-presentation as a sane conduit for these experiences places it in ambiguous rhetorical territory. Felman is thus compelled to ask, “qui parle dans le récit d’Aurélia, et à partir de quel lieu, de quelle instance parlante parle-t-il?” (1978: 67).219 The force of this question is particularly apparent when one recalls Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact,” which consists in the identity of author, narrator and character (1975: 12). Nerval breaches these terms by opening up a strong split between ‘narrator’ and ‘hero’: “Le héros est un ‘fou’; le narrateur un homme qui a recouvré sa ‘raison’” (1978:

68).220 Rather than disavow his mad self and reassert the preeminence of his rational mind, a trajectory that echoes Augustine’s recollection of his “wicked ways” as a form of atonement,

Nerval’s “impossible” project is to legitimate his eccentric experience by giving it a voice, and by not capitulating to the normative, logocentric discourse:

Le propos de Nerval est dès lors d’abolir—par l’écriture—ce verdict d’exclusion, de se faire reconnaître par l’autre, sans pour autant rejeter une partie de lui-même. C’est pourquoi, sans renier sa folie, il entend cependant la nier: contester sa définition réductrice par le discours raisonnable. (Felman, 1978: 65)221

217 “I shall attempt to transcribe my impressions of a lingering malady which has run its course entirely within the mysterious confines of my mind; yet I do not know why I use the term ‘malady’, for so far as I myself am concerned, I have never felt healthier” (1991: 25-26). 218 “to say madness itself” (2003:65). 219 “Who speaks in the narrative of Aurélia and from what discursive position does he speak?” (2003: 66). 220 “the hero is a ‘madman’; the narrator, a man who has recovered his ‘reason’” (Felman, 2003: 67). 221 “Nerval’s intention is henceforth to annul—by means of writing—this verdict of exclusion and, without rejecting any part of himself, to make the other acknowledge him. That is why, without disowning his madness, Nerval nevertheless undertakes to deny it, to contest the reductionist definition given it by the language of reason” (Felman, 2003: 63).

201

Like Nerval, Isaac does not apologize for or attempt to disown her madness. Instead, she tries to understand why, as she puts it, she has been “condamnée a cette vie secrète, criminelle?

Quelle est ma faute, que je doive sans cesse m’exprimer avec cette honte, ce déchirement, comme on s’arrache un aveu” (87-88).222 Channeling Foucault’s concept of confession as the enforcer of “pouvoir-savoir” (1976: 77) she likens her discourse to the extorted confession of a criminal. In addition to her use of the imagery of criminality, Isaac’s mention of her shame moves her language into an affective register, demonstrating the emotional impact of her exclusion from society.223 Her fear of judgment extends to Théodore, whom she imagines scrutinizing her with “le regard du voyeur”; she concludes that “quand je n’aurai plus de mystère, quand tu croiras reconnaître dans cette folie mon secret, le fin mot de ma vie et de mon histoire, je serai jugée et perdue. Ah! Ce n’est pas ce que je veux” (79).224 The characterization of the interlocutor as judge is typical of confessional discourse; recall Foucault’s contention that the person to whom one confesses is “pas simplement l’interlocuteur, mais l’instance qui requiert l’aveu, l’impose, l’apprécie et intervient pour juger” (1976: 83).225 The concern that Isaac expresses to Théodore is emblematic of a more general fear that ‘madness’ is the reductive signifier under which her experience will be subsumed and arbitrated. To be judged mad is for the complexity of her individual being to be negated, for her words to be reduced to the inconsequential ravings of a madwoman, what Foucault calls the “absence of production

222 “condemned to this secret, criminal, life? What is my fault, that I must ceaselessly express myself with this shame, this tearing, as if a confession were being ripped from me?” 223 The association of a feeling of shame with social marginalization is one that, as we have seen, occurs elsewhere in Bouchard’s work, specifically in L’inséparable. 224 “when I have no more mystery, when you think you can discover my secret in this madness, the final word on my life and my story, I will be judged and lost. Oh! That’s not what I want.” 225 “not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes it and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge” (Foucault, [1978] 1990: 61-62).

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[absence d’oeuvre]” (qtd. in Felman, 2003: 66). The narrator thus redefines madness not as an illness but as a subject position she has been forced to occupy within a reductionist social discourse. On several occasions, she therefore attempts to ‘deny’ her madness, in Felman’s sense of the term, suggesting that her confession only has the “apparence de folie” (88). The profession that her story merely has the appearance of madness further complicates her discursive position: the signifier ‘madness’ is redefined as a product of a normative social discourse and not as a designation she gives herself willingly. At times, she tells us, it is easier simply to capitulate to its terms: “J’aime mieux la folie, passer pour une folle, et que ma démence saute aux yeux de tous” (130).226 In spite of her expressed desire for the comfort of a pregiven identity, however, the intense process of self-interrogation she undergoes over the course of the narrative confirms that this is not her final word on the matter. Havercroft is thus correct in defining her “recherche douloureuse d’identité” as a “lutte contre la folie” (1999: 174).227 However, it is important to add that this “battle” is undertaken on two fronts: on the one hand, the narrator is in combat against

“les images” that threaten to overwhelm her sanity. On the other, she is fighting reductionist images of madness within the social imaginary, thus establishing the legitimacy of her subject position. Madness, then, is a shifting signifier that refers in the narrator’s confessional discourse both to a subject position she espouses and to one that she rejects. Like writing, it occupies a paradoxical status, signifying both the narrator’s affliction as well as her critique of the social basis of her affliction.

This notion of paradoxality extends to the extreme use of intertexts, which function simultaneously as markers of the narrator’s madness as well as the means by which she

226 “I like madness better, to pass for a madwoman, and have my craziness jump out at everyone.” 227 “painful search for identity” as a “battle against madness.”

203 productively negotiates various identity positions. Havercroft identifies two primary intertextual strategies in Les images: on the one hand, the rewriting of biblical stories, and on the other, the recycling of proper names (1999: 175-176). At first, the narrator’s use of multiple names to describe a single character appears to be a product of her mental instability. She encourages this interpretation by admitting that there was ‘no particular reason’ for her decision to call Dorothée by the name Rose: “À cette époque, Quelqu’un avait pris le nom de Dorothée, mais je l’appelais, mon Dieu, Rose, parfois, sans raison, je l’appelais Rose” (11).228 Nor does she explain her antonomastic attribution of the indefinite pronoun to her friend.229 Later on, however, when the narrator renames Dorothée “La Frayeur d’Isaac” (55) [“Isaac’s Fear”], it becomes clear that the basis for this name is the narrator’s projection of her own fear onto Dorothée (Havercroft, 1999:

193). Havercroft rightly points out the double nature of this and other instances of periphrasis,230 which “témoignent de la dépendence de la narratrice envers Dorothée, mais constitutent aussi des signes de la folie d’Isaac” (1999: 192-193).231 In literary terms, Isaac’s use of multiple names has both a metaphoric and a metonymic function. Names correspond to specific intertexts, which function as metaphors for the ineffable experience of madness. In their rupture with the conventions of standard discourse, they likewise insert madness into the text through their

228 “At that time, Someone had taken the name Dorothée, but I called her, my God, Rose; sometimes, without any reason, I called her Rose.” 229 Barbara Havercroft’s article “Intertextualité sexuée et recherche d’identité au féminin dans Les images de Louise Bouchard” provides a detailed account of the figures of speech as well as the intertextual strategies used in the text. She points out many other instances of antonomasia, which can be defined as “the substitution of a proper name for a common noun or a common noun for a proper name” (Klein-Lataud, 70) [Translation mine]. (In Havercroft, 1999: 191n40). Although the use of the indefinite pronoun goes unexplained in the text, it is possible to argue that the evacuation of specificity bespeaks a certain interchangeability of the interlocutor. Although Isaac reserves the name “Quelqu’un” exclusively for Dorothée, she undermines this particularity by delimiting its temporality: “À cette époque, Quelqu’un avait pris le nom de Dorothée” (11). One possible interpretation of this statement is that Dorothée occupies a predetermined role, namely that of interlocutor, which Isaac is perpetually attempting to fill; the fact that “Théodore” is a virtual anagram of “Dorothée” lends credence to this hypothesis. 230 “an assemblage of words that expresses in many words what could have been said in less, often in just one word” (Klein-Lataud, 80) [Translation mine]. (In Havercroft, 1999: 192n42). 231 “attest to the narrator’s dependence on Dorothée, but also constitute signs of Isaac’s madness.”

204 contiguity with it. The oscillation between these two modes of metaphor and metonymy is another discursive strategy that simultaneously invites and repels the reader’s gaze. Intertexts extend an olive branch to the reader by situating the story within a familiar symbolic landscape; however, Isaac’s idiosyncratic appropriation of them defamiliarizes both the stories to which they refer and the characters to which they are applied. Whereas the intertexts in By Grand

Central Station invite the reader into a world of love and beauty, those in Les images remind the reader that its narrator has broken with reality.

Isaac’s fluctuating identification with biblical, literary and mythological narratives dramatizes both her lack of self-coherence as well as her search for a position from which to speak: as with her use of multiple names to refer to others, her shifting self-designation is both a sign of madness and the means by which it is resisted. Anne-Marie Grondhovd has described

Isaac’s obsession with the story of Abraham and Isaac as “un cri d’alerte annonçant le danger posé par ce mythe et les écrits qui le relatent dans la grande Histoire” (1998: 985).232 Her follow- up question, “Y aurait-il d'autres textes et documents capables de transmettre des images culturelles et des reproductions psychiques différentes de la femme?”233 (Grondhovd, 1998:

985), expresses the critical consensus that intertexts function primarily to critique patriarchal narratives. To an extent, this is a valid assessment. The narrator repeatedly confirms her affiliation with Isaac, who was saved from sacrifice, making claims such as “Je serai Isaac. C’est mieux. Je préfère le destin d’Isaac” (70).234 She prefers this association over that of Jephte’s

232 “A cry of alarm announcing the danger posed by this myth and the writings that relate it to the grand narrative of History.” 233 “Could there be other texts and documents capable of transmitting different cultural and psychological images of woman?” 234 “I’ll be Isaac. It’s better. I prefer Isaac’s fate.”

205 unnamed daughter, who dies “sans laisser un nom ni une descendance” (70).235 Mieke Bal has written extensively on the juxtaposition of these two “complementary” (Bal, 1988: 110) Biblical sacrifices, which she argues reveals a profound patriarchal bias. “The silencing of [women’s] voices,” Bal writes, “[...] signifies them as ideologically silenced. On the level of discourse, these women are not subjects: they do not speak. On the second level [...] of vision or focalization, they are not subjects either. Their vision is not given, not considered, and not responded to (Bal,

1988: 32-33). Bal’s intervention into this erasure is to give Jepthe’s daughter a name, “Bath,” so as to fill the absence with a positive identity. Like Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea, Bal and

Bouchard rectify the ‘ideological silencing’ by moving marginal characters to the centre of the narrative. Isaac uses her confession to speak from the position of the sacrificed daughter, a project compatible with her critique of madness and patriarchy alike. Her juxtaposition of the two stories highlights the bias that prefers a son over a daughter. Moreover, the narrator’s attempt to give substance to Bath’s story corrects the Bible’s brief, euphemistic account of her fate, which states only that Jephte “carried out his vow with her which he had vowed” (Judges

11:39).236

Grondhovd is too quick to argue that Bouchard “renverse la suprématie de la figure masculine omniprésente dans les mythes” (1998: 989),237 however, for the narrator’s most sustained intertext in the search for her identity is clearly Isaac, a male character. The simple fact of the narrator’s cross-gendered self-casting in this role does not signal her desire to “reverse the

235 “without leaving a name nor a descendence.” 236 Isaac imagines the scene thus: “Elle court vers lui, l’innocente, elle se jette dans ses bras, en souriant, en riant, heureuse qu’il soit vivant. Elle se jette dans la mort. Elle aime son père, la fille de Jephté qui n’a pas de nom. Et c’est elle qu’il va sacrificier, il l’a promis. Il tiendra sa promesse” (69-70). [“She runs towards him, the Innocent, she throws herself in his arms, smiling, laughing, happy that he’s alive. She throws herself into death. And it is her that he will sacrifice, he promised it. He will keep his promise.”] 237 “reverses the supremacy of the omnipresent masculine figure in myths.”

206 supremacy of the omnimpresent male” in this story. In many ways, her interest in the biblical narrative transcends questions of gender. Isaac likens herself to her namesake not only because he was saved, but, more importantly, because in the moment of sacrifice, he saw death: “Oh! J’ai vu la mort! Et je suis éternellement Isaac dans ce temps arrêté, ce moment où le couteau, sa lame brillant sous le soleil, est suspendu au-dessus de ma gorge” (19).238 Here, Isaac is understood not as the progenitor of the Israelites, but in terms of his extreme vulnerability at the moment where he was to become the victim of a sacrifice beyond his control. The periphrastic designation of

Dorothée as “la Frayeur d’Isaac” (55) further shifts the focus from the heroic account of

Abraham’s aborted sacrifice to the phenomenal experience of its victim. While the Bible may devote more lines to the exposition of Isaac’s story than that of Jepthe’s daughter, it is worth pointing out that Isaac’s perspective is largely absent from the biblical account: throughout the whole ordeal, he utters but one brief question.239 When the narrator confesses that she is

“eternally Isaac,” she is speaking not as the representative of male privilege but as a victim of the edict of the powerful. Clearly, her use of this particular intertext is laden with the same ambiguity that characterizes her discourse: Isaac is in one sense the counterpoint to Jephte’s daughter, but in another sense, he is her twin. He is both the forefather of Israel and the trembling victim of sacrifice. The madness of the movement between subject positions, as between intertexts, is also the entirely intelligible quest for self-understanding and expression.

The identification of (the biblical) Isaac as a victim is further emphasized by the connection (the narrator) Isaac makes between him and Régine, the fiancée renounced by

238 Oh! I have seen death! And I am eternally Isaac in that stopped time, the moment where the knife, its blade glistening in the sun, is suspended above my throat.” 239 “And Isaac spoke unto Abraham his father, and said: ‘My father.’ And he said: ‘Here am I, my son.’ And he said: ‘Behold the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?’” (Genesis 22:7).

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Kierkegaard so that the latter could better pursue the contemplative life. “Et je pensais à lui

[Kierkegaard] encore,” Isaac writes, “et à sa reine, sa fiancée Régine qu’il allait sacrifier comme

Isaac” (100).240 Isaac’s focus on a detail of Kierkegaard’s biography rather than on his philosophy must be regarded as an important feminist intervention insofar as it shifts the discourse surrounding this powerful male figure. Rather than engaging with his ideas, Isaac moves a suppressed biographical detail to centre stage, revealing the patriarchal system on which the elaboration of such ideas rests. Implicit in her description of this particular sacrifice is a broader commentary on the exclusion of women from the male-dominated field of philosophical discourse. By further mining Regina’s name etymologically for emphasis (regina being the Latin word for ‘queen’), Isaac performs a gesture similar to that of Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea and of

Bal in her invention of “Bath”: she gives a name, and by extension a voice, to a woman who has hitherto been silent.

In addition to the overtly feminist dimension of Bouchard’s engagement with

Kierkegaard, it must be noted that the latter also makes an important contribution to her thinking on madness. A representative passage from Fear and Trembling serves as the epigraph to Les images: “Mais quand je me mets à réfléchir sur Abraham, je suis comme anéanti” (7).241 The use of this particular text as a thematic touchstone is significant, as Kierkegaard’s aim in Fear and

Trembling is to establish madness as a basis for faith. The reason he is “virtually annihilated,” the speaker242 tells us, is that “I cannot close my eyes and hurl myself trustingly into the absurd”

240 “And I was thinking about him again, and about his queen, his fiancee Regina whom he would sacrifice like Isaac.” 241 “But when I have to think about Abraham I am virtually annihilated” ([1843] 1985: 62). [Note: a more precise translation of this line is, “But when I begin to think about Abraham I am virtually annihilated” (Translation and emphasis mine)]. 242 Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, an avatar whose voice strongly frames the argument.

208

([1843] 1985: 63) as Abraham did when he obeyed God’s command. In order to give body to the story and to adequately convey its stakes, Kierkegaard, like Bouchard, offers multiple accounts of Isaac’s sacrifice: “But Isaac could not understand [his father],” Kierkegaard pictures in one version, “his soul could not be uplifted; he clung to Abraham’s knees, pleaded at his feet, begged for his young life” ([1843] 1985: 45). In another, he imagines that when Isaac saw his father’s clenched hand, “a shudder went through his body” ([1843] 1985: 47). Kierkegaard’s purpose in describing Isaac’s fear as well as the sorrow of his parents, Abraham and Sarah, is to accentuate the madness of a man who would, without question, sacrifice the beloved, miraculous, product of his twilight years, to an unknowable God: “Abraham had faith and did not doubt. He believed the ridiculous” ([1843] 1985: 54). In Fear and Trembling, faith is a kind of madness insofar as it means believing in something for which there is no rational basis. Another word Kierkegaard associates with faith is “passion” ([1843] 1985: 146), which similarly expresses its non-rational quality. Significantly, Kierkegaard likewise describes God’s inscrutable commands in terms of their fundamental “madness”:

Venerable Father Abraham! Second father to the human race! You who first saw and bore witness to that tremendous passion that scorns the fearful struggle with the raging elements and the forces of creation in order to struggle with God instead, you who first knew that supreme passion, the sacred, pure, and humble expression of the divine madness which the pagans admired. ([1843] 1985: 56)

Kierkegaard’s privileging of madness as both a quality of the divine and the faithful functions as yet another critique of the view that equates madness with degeneracy. Whereas Nerval challenges this conception by rejecting the language of medicalization, Kierkegaard provides another model that aligns madness with an order that transcends the mundane: in his hierarchy, passion is superior to reason. On the one hand, Isaac’s religious impulses evoke the classic

209 delusions of grandeur associated with madness, on display in Foucault’s account of the former clergyman who became convinced he was Christ ([1964] 1988: 260). In this vein, Isaac’s frenzied attempt to read the signs and portents in her environment can be dismissed as signs of her madness (15). At the same time, the text’s continual references to figures such as

Kierkegaard and Nerval243 suggest that madness is also a kind of insight into a different mode of perception. At the text’s conclusion, this becomes the basis for Isaac’s ability to relate empathically to her young neighbour, Florence: “J’ai cru voir mon propre fantôme replié, apeuré, prostré dans la panique et le silence” (134).244 Because Isaac has seen the knife blade poised above her throat and returned to speak of it, she alone can provide “refuge” (134) to this young girl, whom she regards as another avatar for herself. Bouchard’s treament of the story of

Abraham and Isaac is thus interpretable in (at least) three ways: it signifies male privilege, it records the experience of the victim, and it points to a supramundane form of perception. All the while, the dialectical movement between appropriation and rejection of the intertext as an identity position expresses the fundamental madness that underpins Bouchard’s text.

Les images is, in Felman’s terms, both a “discourse on madness” and a “discourse of madness.” Madness is one of the main foci of its investigation, and at the same time the primary modality of Bouchard’s “impossible” text. It is fitting that the book ends with the narrator’s decision not to “terminer cette lettre par un immense appel vers toi, comme un aveu” (134),245 as this explicit denial of the scene of confession makes overt what has been implicit throughout.

While putatively reaching out to an interlocutor, his presence, and ours by extension, is, in the final analysis, superfluous. If we readers believed that we were convened to “judge poets for

243 Like Isaac, Neval believed, in his state of madness, that he saw a portent of his death on a particular date (31). 244 “I thought I saw my own ghost doubled over, frightened, prostrate in panic and silence.” 245 “end this letter with an enormous appeal to you, like a confession.”

210 their sins” (Sherwin, 2011: 25), it becomes quickly apparent that our presence is entirely unnecessary, if not downright voyeuristic. Anticipating our scopophilic desire, the text stages its resistance by refusing to offer up a stable discursive position for our analysis. At times, it appears that the narrator is speaking from a place of madness; the moment we try to qualify it, however, she has deconstructed her own rhetorical position, either by anticipating our reaction or by drawing our attention to undeniable rationality of her discourse. Her use of multiple and perpetually resymbolized intertexts simultaneously thwarts our desire to attach her confession to any stable subject position.

The infelicity of Isaac’s confession can be regarded as one of the “necessary failures” that, for Judith Butler, “exceed and defy the injunction by which they are generated” ([1990]

2008: 199). For Butler, the “failure” of a performance is necessary because it exposes the contingency of social norms and thus paves the way for the “variation” that engenders agency

([1990] 2008: 198). Rejecting the idea of the transcendental subject, Butler argues that it is only by “taking up the tools where they lie” that the subject can begin ‘reconfiguring’ the options available to her in terms of her identity ([1990] 2008: 199). This is the kind of work that Isaac is clearly doing in the unstable and heterodox appropriation of various cultural touchstones.

Barbara Havercroft locates Bouchard’s subversive practice in her “reprise des textes, de noms et de thèmes, accompagnée des modifications et des resignifications de ces derniers dans une perspective féministe” (1999: 196n47).246 While Havercroft’s study reveals the feminist underpinnings of Bouchard’s text, it is equally possible to consider the novel’s formal subversions as a deliberate undermining of the confessional discourse that engenders pouvoir- savoir. By casting the reader into the role of powerless voyeur, destabilizing the unity as well as

246 “rewriting of texts, names, and themes, accompanied by modifications and resignifications within a feminist perspective.”

211 the discursive position of the speaking subject, and, ultimately, withdrawing the very confession on which the text rests, Les images stages its resistance to the normative gaze. In so doing, it finds a way to escape the “silence” into which madness has been relegated. Recall Derrida’s haunting injunction that, “quand on veut dire leur silence lui-même, on est déjà passé à l’ennemi”

(1967b: 58).247 Rather than engage in a “monologue of reason about madness” or, alternatively, attempt to represent madness itself (a strategy that risks collapsing, at best, into essentialism, and at worst, into bathos), Bouchard finds a way for madness to speak. Ironically, it is only “en vertu d’une irréductible résistance de la chose à l’interprétation” (Felman, 1978: 349),248 through the articulation of an impossible confession, that Bouchard is able to make a meaningful intervention into the discourse of madness.

Provincetown Playhouse, juillet 1919, j’avais 19 ans: Introduction

If the formal conceit of Les images, the ‘unsent letter’, sets up the conditions of its impossibility, the premise of Normand Chaurette’s play Provincetown Playhouse is arguably even more extreme in this regard: “[i]njouable, irreprésentable, totale,”249 declared Gilles Chagnon in the

1981 introduction to the Leméac text (1981: 9). According to Jean Cléo Godin, this kind of pronouncement functions as a leitmotif within the discourse on Chaurette: “son théâtre est un pur chef-d’oeuvre,” proclaim the critics; “mais comment peut-on jouer ça?” (1994: 187).250 While

Provincetown Playhouse presents its own particular set of difficulties, which will be discussed presently, it is instructive to situate this particular play within a dramatic corpus that Chaurette

247 “when one attempts to convey their silence itself, one has already passed over to the side of the enemy” (1978: 36). 248 “by virtue of the dynamic resistance to interpretation” (Felman, 2003: 254). 249 “unplayable, unrepresentable, total” [Translations mine unless otherwise indicated.] 250 “His theatre is a pure masterpiece; but how do we stage it?”

212 has built “en marge d’une tradition qui serait plus typiquement québécoise” (Riendeau, 1997: 10-

11).251 Conspicuously absent from his work, notes Pascal Riendeau, are the standard aesthetic and topical markers of the Québécois stage: among these, Riendeau cites Marcel Dubé’s naturalism, Michel Tremblay’s joual, Michel Garneau’s humour, Claude Germain’s historicism, and Félix Leclerc’s appeal to folklore (1997: 11). Nor are his plays explicitly concerned with questions of sovereignty and national identity; while these topics were still being debated on the political stage during Chaurette’s period of greatest artistic output in the 80s and 90s, their importance on the theatrical stage had become greatly reduced in the wake of the failed referendum of 1980 (Riendeau, 1997: 34). Chaurette’s work marks a definitive “virage” [turn]

(Riendeau, 1997: 33; Godin, 2012) in the dramatic trajectory of Québécois writers: many of the features that make Provincetown Playhouse so challenging for its readers—its generic hybridity, metatextuality, rejection of empirical truth and cultural metanarratives—are consistent with the aesthetic of postmodernism.252 It is to this inherent difficulty that the lukewarm reception of many of his plays (Riendeau, 1997: 13) can perhaps be ascribed. Nevertheless, Chaurette has achieved critical success with works such as Rêve d’une nuit d’hôpital, initially broadcast in

1976 as a radio-play on Radio-Canada, for which he was awarded the international Prix Paul-

Gilson. The stage version was subsequently produced in 1980. Provincetown Playhouse, which

Godin hails as “l’une des plus grandes oeuvres de tout le répertoire québécois” (2012),253 has been produced on multiple occasions and has garnered a significant amount of critical attention.

251 “On the margins of a tradition that is more typically Québécois.” 252 Cf. Paterson, Janet, 1993: 1. 253 “One of the most important works in the entire Québécois repertoire.”

213

Nevertheless, there is a dearth of scholarly writing on Chaurette’s thematization of madness, which is central to both of the aforementioned texts,254 and which warrants further consideration.

Chagnon’s affirmation of the play’s impossibility is partially attributable to its setting: while physically interned in a Chicago insane asylum, Charles Charles 38, “imaginant ou rêvant ou délirant” (Riendeau, 1997: 66)255 repeats his “one-man-show” (26) every night on the stage of his own mind. As readers/viewers, we find ourselves situated, improbably, within this most intimate of psychological venues, from which point we are transported in time and space to

Provincetown, Massachussetts, nineteen years prior. Among a confused assemblage of thoughts and memories, we witness in the mind of Charles Charles 38 fragments of the Théâtre de l’immolation de la beauté,256 his career-ending play, whose lone performance, in 1919, saw a real baby stabbed to death on stage. According to its playwright, “L’énigme de la pièce:

Savaient-ils [i.e., the actors] que ce sac contenait un enfant?” (26).257 Significantly, however, this

“enigma” refers not to the plot of the play per se, a generically-indeterminate, esoteric, drama written in an overblown poetic style, but to the extratextual circumstances surrounding its performance. Charles Charles 38 is thus in fact announcing the enigma of Provincetown

Playhouse, the play we the audience encounter, rather than that of L’immolation, the play-within- a-play. If Provincetown Playhouse, with its nineteen disjointed tableaux punctuated by excerpts

254 As Chaurette writes in the introduction to Rêve d’une nuit d’hôpital, “au bout du rêve, il y a toujours le risque d’un hôpital” [“at the edge of the dream, there is always the risk of a hospital”] (1980: 21). Like Provincetown Playhouse, Rêve d’une nuit d’hôpital uses tableaux to depict the psychological turmoil of its protagonist, in this case the late-19th /early-20th century Québécois poet Émile Nelligan. 255 “imagining or dreaming or raving.” 256 “Theatre of the Immolation of Beauty.” I will from this point on abbreviate the title to L’immolation. 257 “The play’s enigma: did they [i.e., the actors] know that this bag contained a child?”

214 from the protagonist’s memoirs,258 can be said to have any definite narrative arc, it is the exposition of the circumstances surrounding the on-stage murder of the child. The mystery is revealed at the play’s end, when Charles Charles 38 admits that he lured, drugged, and placed the child in the bag, in order to punish the actors, namely his lover Winslow, and Alvan, with whom

Charles Charles 19 (Charles Charles 38’s younger self) caught Winslow having an affair. Charles

Charles 19 and 38’s ‘informal’ confessional rhetoric morphs into its ‘institutional’ counterpart as they incarnate the proceedings of the actors’ legal trial for murder. Unable to articulate a convincing self-defence, Winslow and Alvan are both hanged, while Charles Charles 19, claiming insanity, is confined to a mental institution.

With the revelation of this information, it becomes clear that the confessional rhetoric of the play is both the incarnation of madness, insofar as it seemingly corresponds to a mad subject, and the result of madness, understood in its legal sense, as the means by which Charles Charles

19 was exonerated from criminal responsibility. It is both a “discours de la folie” (Felman, 1978:

347) and a “discours sur la folie” (Felman, 1978: 347)259: a mad confession, and a confession of madness. The infelicity of Charles Charles 19 and 38’s discursive positions complicates their confessions: as in the famous “liar paradox,”260 where the affirmation of a statement’s falsehood

258 There are in fact two versions of Provincetown Playhouse. The 1981 Leméac edition is Chaurette’s second version, modified to enable its movement from page to stage. A brief note appended to the end of the text suggests that it is theoretically possible to piece the first version back together, but as Riendeau points out, such an undertaking (which he valiantly undertakes) is complicated by missing or contradictory information (1997: 67). The extant version is arranged as follows: Tableaux 1-4; Excerpt from Charles Charles’s memoirs; Tableau 5; Excerpt from the memoirs; Tableaux 6-10; Excerpt from the memoirs; Tableau 11; Excerpt from the memoirs; Tableau 12; Excerpt from the memoirs; Tableaux 13-19; Author’s note containing variations on tableaux 6 and 11. The presence of these variants has occasioned a certain amount of directorial decision-making: in her 1992 production at Montréal’s ESPACE GO, for example, Alice Ronfard added the variants to tableaux 6 and 11 inside the play, resulting in a total of 21 tableaux (Riendeau, 1997: 67). 259 “discourse on madness” and a “discourse of madness.” 260 The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes this paradox nicely: “The first sentence in this essay is a lie. There is something odd about saying so, as has been known since ancient times. To see why, remember that all lies are untrue. Is the first sentence true? If it is, then it is a lie, and so it is not true. Conversely, suppose that it is not

215 renders the statement true and thus not false, ad infinitum, the awareness of one’s own madness, analogously, should be categorically precluded. Charles Charles 38’s declaration, “ils ne pouvaient rien contre moi... j’étais fou... j’étais fou” (111)261 seemingly undermines the veracity of its affirmation, for it is precisely this kind of introspection that a mad subject lacks. As

Shoshana Felman puts it, “parler de la folie, c’est toujours, en effet, dénier la folie; quelle que soit la façon dont on puisse représenter la folie et se la représenter, (se) représenter la folie c’est toujours [...] se jouer la scène de la dénégation de sa propre folie” (1978: 347).262 Whereas Isaac consciously denies the reductive discourses that result in social marginalization, Charles Charles

38’s claiming of the label of madman unconsciously subverts his profession of madness. The impossibility of defining categorically the speaker’s mental state is the cornerstone of the play’s general “refus de proposer une vision du monde unique ou encore d’envisager le monde comme un système cohérent (comme un Tout)” (Riendeau, 1997: 70).263 As readers/viewers, we are not asked to determine, judge-like, whether Charles Charles 19/38 is mad or not mad, but rather to accept that they are both and neither. Whereas the standard confession is geared toward the revelation of constative truth, the purely performative nature of the confessional discourse in

Provincetown Playhouse poses a challenge to the logocentric assumptions that underlie confession as an institutional practice. As Peter Brooks attests, “The act of self-exposure is undeniable, as an act, as a performance, indeed as a performative, though always doubtable as a

true. As we (viz., the authors) have said it, presumably with the intention of you believing it when it is not true, it is a lie. But then it is true!” (Beall and Glazenberg, 2013). 261 “They couldn’t do anything against me... I was mad... I was mad...” 262 “To talk about madness is always, in fact, to deny it. However one represents madness to oneself or others, to represent madness is always, consciously or unconsciously, to play out the scene of the denial of one’s own madness” (1978: 252). 263 “refusal to offer one single vision of the world or to understand it as a coherent system, as a Whole.”

216 factual reference, as a constative” (2000: 51). As in Les images, madness, in Chaurette’s play, functions to sever the pouvoir-savoir nexus: confession is no longer the royal road to the disclosure of truth, but rather the modality of an infelicitous performance that reveals the power dynamics latent in normative discourse itself.

Provincetown Playhouse as Impossible Performance

For Felman, the true madness of texts is to be sought “entre les textes de la folie et la folie du texte” (1978: 347),264 in “ce mouvement de jeu qui déjoue le sens et par lequel l’énoncé s’aliène

à la performance textuelle” (Felman, 1978: 347-348).265 The madness of Provincetown

Playhouse, correspondingly, is not to be found simply in the self-proclaimed insanity of the protagonist, but in the textual strategies that undermine his very profession of insanity. Within the first few lines of the play, Charles Charles 38 interrupts a direct address to the audience to make the aside, seemingly to himself, “leur dire que je suis fou” (26).266 It is not entirely clear, however, whether such an admission would constitute a confessional disclosure or an outright lie. This uncertainty is sustained throughout the play, as Charles Charles 38 repeatedly makes comments that suggest his “antic disposition,” to use Hamlet’s phrase, is ‘put on’ (Shakespeare,

1990: I.v):

CHARLES CHARLES 38, avec un rire très bref: Ah, assez! tu vas finir par me rendre fou pour vrai!

264 “somewhere between their literary rhetoric of madness and the madness of their literary rhetoric” (2003: 252). 265 “ungovernable linguistic play, through which meaning misfires and the text’s statement is estranged from its performance” (Felman, 2003: 252). 266 “tell them I’m mad.”

217

CHARLES CHARLES 19: Tu es fou! C’est toi qui l’as dit. Tu l’as dit au juge, aux policiers, à tout le monde. C’est toi qui as choisi de venir vivre ici, vivre avec des fous dans une maison de fous (33).267

What emerges out of this exchange is the possibility that the two Charles Charles are referring to slightly different understandings of the “truth”: the version to which Charles Charles 19 gives voice is the product of an institutional confession, the “truth” in the eyes of the law; this is the same “vérité” that Foucault argues “n’est pas libre par nature, [...] sa production est tout entière traversée par des rapports de pouvoir” (1976: 81).268 Charles Charles 38 appears to confirm that his madness is actually the product of an institutional confession later in the play, when he incorporates his original aside into an admission that his insanity was first and foremost a legal strategy:

CHARLES CHARLES 38: Il s’agissait de le dire... il s’agissait d’un peu de lucidité. Quand on se trouve acculé, qu’il y a plus rien d’autre à dire... leur dire que j’étais fou, et de le devenir, par conséquent (99).269

The irony of using “lucidity” to arrive at a defense of insanity is, of course, antithetical to his affirmation of madness. At the same time, however, Charles Charles 38’s enigmatic assertion that he really did ultimately go mad prevents us from arriving at any kind of definitive conclusion: as in Hamlet as well as Les images, the question of whether or not the madness is feigned remains open. Undeniably, there is just as much textual evidence that Charles Charles 38

267 CHARLES CHARLES 38, with a very brief laugh: Ah, enough! You’re going to end up driving me crazy for real! CHARLES CHARLES 19: You are crazy! You’re the one who said it. You said it to the judge, to the police officers, to everybody. You’re the one who chose to come live here, to live with crazy people in a madhouse. 268 “truth is not by nature free—[...] its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power” ([1978] 1990: 60). 269 CHARLES CHARLES 38: It needed to be said. A little lucidity was called for. When one finds oneself cornered, when there’s nothing else to say... tell them I’m mad, and go mad, as a result.

218 is not in fact malingering, including the very premise of the performance we witness, which putatively transpires in the mind of the protagonist and “dure depuis dix-neuf ans. À tous les soirs, elle recommence” (99).270 The contradictory information regarding Charles Charles 38’s mental state expresses the subversive function of confessional discourse in Provincetown

Playhouse, which never refers to a defined constative referent, but rather points away from truth in an endless series of deferrals.

The madness that renders the protagonist’s discursive position undecidable is detectable at every level of Chaurette’s play, which the playwright himself has called “une pièce sur le théâtre” (Riendeau, 2000: 438).271 Implied in this description is an engagement with the conventions that underwrite the stage; that Provincetown Playhouse’s speech acts are often deliberately infelicitous, however, is consistent with Chaurette’s avowed dream of “écrire la pièce impossible à monter” (Riendeau, 1997: 13).272 The pursuit of impossibility/infelicity is detectable almost immediately, as the reader encounters stage directions for smells (“Odeur de sel et de poisson frais” [24])273 and the stipulation that the décor must represent “la mer un soir de pleine lune” but as experienced “dans la tête de l’auteur” (24).274 This setting, arguably better suited to a reading of the play than to its performance, is one of the techniques by which

Chaurette elevates the status of the theatrical text from its standard role as a supplement to performance. While the text of Provincetown Playhouse bears many of the discursive hallmarks of a script, it is not entirely clear whether it was ever meant to be staged. As Pascal Riendeau

270 “Has lasted for nineteen years. Every night, it starts again.” 271 “a play about theatre.” 272 “writing the play that is impossible to stage.” 273 “Odour of salt and fresh fish.” 274 “the sea on a night with full moon” but as experienced “in the author’s mind.”

219 notes, the text was published before it was performed, provoking the question of “le premier destinataire du texte théâtral: est-ce le spectateur ou le lecteur?” (1997: 13).275 The periodic insertion of excerpts from Charles Charles’s Mémoires certainly appears more conducive to the experience of reading than of viewing the play: Alice Ronfard accordingly cut these sections entirely from her 1992 production at Montreal’s L’ESPACE GO. By contrast, in his 1984 production at the Maison Carrée in Chicoutimi, Pierre Fortin brought the text to centre stage, plastering the walls and ceiling of the set with large reams of paper displaying the script of

Provincetown Playhouse such that the play’s viewers simultaneously became its readers. As

Shawn Huffman notes, the effect of this choice is a conflation of speaker and utterance: “le personnage central s’enferme dans l’énoncé, voire s’intègre à l’énoncé parce qu’il joue dans son texte” (1996).276 The irruption of textuality into the body of the narrative poses a challenge to the logocentric assumption that “[s]igns or representations [...] are but a way to get at reality, truth, or ideas, and they should be as transparent as possible; they should not get in the way, should not affect or infect the thought or truth they represent” (Culler, 2000: 9). Nowhere should this principle hold truer than in the case of confession, which is meant to provide access to the interiority of the subject. However, while Provincetown Playhouse putatively takes place in the very mind of its speaker, our desire for unmediated access is negated by the privileging of the utterance over the constative reality to which it is supposed to refer.

275 “the first destinatee of the script: is it the spectator, or the reader?” Riendeau points out that two of Chaurette’s other plays, La société des Métis (1983) and Fragments d’une lettre d’adieu lus par des géologues (1986) were likewise published before they were performed (Riendeau, 1997: 13). 276 “the main character encloses himself in the utterance, indeed integrates himself into the utterance because he plays in his text.”

220

Chaurette carries the integration of speaker and utterance to its extreme by transgressing the discursive boundaries separating text from paratext. Theatrical directions are transformed into dialogue as characters verbalize the names of the roles they are playing:

CHARLES CHARLES 38: Le juge: “Le saviez-vous qu’il y avait un enfant dans le sac?” CHARLES CHARLES 19: L’auteur: “Au point où j’en suis... je ne sais plus... même si je savais...” (35).277

They also speak stage directions aloud: Charles Charles 38’s very first lines (“Odeurs de sel et de poisson frais. Bruit d’un harmonica, bruit des vagues [...] [25])278 recapitulate Chaurette’s stage directions verbatim, creating a mise en abyme effect, such that it is no longer clear whether these latter are meant to apply to our play or to the play-within-a-play. This mise en abyme is sustained throughout Provincetown Playhouse, where the boundary between textual layers is so porous that it is never entirely clear on what diegetic layer the action is occurring at any given moment. Paradigmatically, Tableau 9, which putatively depicts a run of L’immolation, is actually a condensed, metatextual, recapitulation of Provincetown Playhouse itself:

CHARLES CHARLES 19: Projecteur sur trois garçons enveloppés dans la fumée bleue de leurs cigarettes... WINSLOW: ...projecteur sur un sac l’énigme de la pièce savaient-ils que ce sac contenait un enfant... ALVAN: le 19 juillet 1938 soit dix-neuf ans plus tard la pièce est l’oeuvre d’un auteur dangereusement malade... (67)279

277 “CHARLES CHARLES 38: The judge: “Did you know there was a child in the bag?” CHARLES CHARLES 19: The author: “At the point I’m at... I don’t know anymore... Even if I knew...” 278 “Odours of salt and fresh fish. Sound of a harmonica, sound of the waves.” 279 CHARLES CHARLES 19: Projector on three boys enveloped in the blue smoke of their cigarettes... WINSLOW: ...projector on a bag the enigma of the play did they know that this bag contained a child... ALVAN: July 19 1938 say nineteen years later the play is the work of an author who is dangerously ill...

221

Charles Charles 19 and Winslow both speak the stage directions aloud, the latter conflating these with the “enigma” of the play, which, as we know, is in fact our enigma. Alvan recapitulates a line spoken by Charles Charles 38 in Tableau 1, which is set in 1938; this is of course illogical given that we are told Alvan was hanged in 1921 (103-104). The recontextualization of stage directions, dialogue, and other theatrical elements creates an effect of defamiliarization that draws attention away from their function as constatives within the world of the text to their role as elements in a performance. According to Austin, what distinguishes the constative utterance is that it, “unlike the performative, is true or false” ([1962] 1990: 45). In Provincetown Playhouse, it is not possible to determine the veracity of any given affirmation, as there is no “vérité univoque” (Riendeau, 1997: 13)280 that subtends the play. This statement applies to all aspects of the text, including paratextual elements such as stage directions and section headings: these lose their constative connection to the extratextual world, becoming integrated into Chaurette’s overarching performance of the “immolation” of theatrical convention.

The collapse of referential stability is pointedly at odds with the play’s fixation with the modes of discourse that engender truth. Structurally, Provincetown Playhouse can be regarded as a series of concatenating confessional scenarios: it opens with Charles Charles 38’s “adresse au public” (25), proceeds to dramatize his and others’ testimony to the judge, and is punctuated by excerpts from his memoirs.281 In addition to the expectation of self-disclosure that attends these premises, the play likewise gestures toward facticity in its almost hyperbolic surplus of empirical detail. Its title, Provincetown Playhouse, juillet 1919, j’avais 19 ans, is emblematic in this

280 “univocal truth.” 281 A possible exception to this structure are Tableaux 6 and 8, which depict performances of L’immolation. According to some readings, as we will see, even these can to an extent be considered confessional insofar as they correspond to the private thoughts of Charles Charles (Chagnon, 1981: 16-17).

222 regard, bombarding its audience with an excess of information including the setting, year, month, and age of its protagonist. The use of the first person connotes a diaristic recording of the events that occurred on this day, suggesting once again that the text contained within its pages will provide some kind of constatively coherent account that can be attributed to a stable subject.

Additionally, the naming of a real theatrical venue, at which Eugene O’Neill did in fact stage the performance of Bound East for Cardiff in 1916 mentioned in the text, adds to the reader’s desire for an intelligible connection between the articulation of this information and a corresponding reality. While the titular date is undoubtedly significant insofar as it marks the inauspicious performance of Charles Charles’s career-ending play, however, the reader’s expectation of a logical exposition of events is systematically thwarted: “c’est dans un présent insituable que se déroule Provincetown Playhouse” (Chagnon, 1981: 11)282 rather than in any definite spatially or temporally-delineated location. Moreover, the univocity of the “je” is exploded by the proliferation of potential speakers: Riendeau posits a possible homology between this “je” and the writer of the Mémoires (1997: 73), although one can just as easily attribute it to Winslow, who gives the play’s title verbatim as part of his testimony in the eleventh tableau, or to Alvan, who does the same in the twelfth. Thus, rather than establishing the play’s constative parameters, the use of confessional scenarios and excessively specific detail “déjoue[nt] le sens” of the confession (Felman, 1978: 347),283 creating the expectation of a disclosure that is immediately foreclosed both by the lack of a constative referent and by the iteration of supposedly singular utterances.

282 “it’s in an unlocatable present that Provincetown Playhouse unfolds.” 283 “estrange the sense.”

223

The recurrence of lines of dialogue discussed above is but one of the text’s many devices of repetition that “vont déjouer la singularité du moment et lui substituer sa réalite itérative”

(Chagnon, 1981: 10),284 thus dispelling the confessional integrity of the utterance. Another prominent iteration is the proliferation of Charles Charleses, whom we encounter at age 19 and

38, as well as in his capacity as the disembodied authorial voice of the Mémoires (whom Jean

Cléo Godin calls a “troisième Charles Charles” [1985: 116]). The doubling of his name is the first of many indications that Charles Charles is “l’incontestable et tout-puissant maître du jeu”

(Godin, 1985: 116)285: in fact, one possible reading of the play interprets the entirety of the drama as but “une élucubration, parmi d’autres, elaborée par un fou sans âge, à partir d’objets de hasard, et pour un public inventé” (Chagnon, 1981: 17).286 This was the choice made by Pierre

Fortin, who staged the play as one-man-show (performed by Larry Tremblay). Paradoxically, this ubiquity serves both to increase and negate Charles Charles’s rhetorical authority. On the one hand, the use of his point of view creates an effect of omnipotence: in Fortin’s production,

“Charles Charles est l’unique personnage de ce drame, les autres n’étant que ses créatures, qu’il dirige à son gré et, souvent, à leur insu” (Godin, 1985: 117).287 While other interpretations of the play attribute slightly less ontological power to its protagonist (i.e., they regard his fragmented recollections as grounded in some kind of empirical reality within the world of the text rather than as pure inventions), Charles Charles is in all circumstances the incontestable mediator of a drama that literally occurs ‘inside his head’. At the same time, however, the effect of

284 “will frustrate the singularity of the moment and substitute instead the reality of iteration.” 285 “the incontestible and all-powerful master of the game” 286 “but one lucubration, amidst others, elaborated by an ageless madman, inspired by objects at random, and for an invented public.” 287 “Charles Charles is the lone character in this drama, the others being but his creations, whom he directs at his will, and often without their knowledge.”

224 multiplication also undermines the authority of the speaker by dismantling the singularity of his narrative. The impossibility of linking Charles Charles’s discourse to one primary subject evacuates his speech acts of any constative univocity. The problematic nature of this iteration becomes particularly clear in the scenes detailing his confession to the “judge,” who is also performed by Charles Charles. The result is the necessary infelicity of a trial that is in violation of all aspects of Austin’s second postulate of performative success288: if Charles Charles is both the prosecution and defense, it goes without saying that the trial’s outcome will be decided in his favour. Charles Charles can thus be regarded as the unreliable narrator par excellence; what distinguishes him from others, a pertinent example being his tautonymous twin, Humbert

Humbert of Lolita, is the extent to which his authorial perspective undermines the constative value of the text. Humbert Humbert can largely be trusted when it comes to the details of his sordid itinerary with the underage Lolita; it is the moral landscape that broaches our suspicion. In

Provincetown Playhouse, more radically, not even the most basic factual details can be taken as given: “l’exploration spatio-temporelle d’un personnage interné” (Riendeau, 1997: 93)289 trumps empirical precision.

The constative value of the confessional discourse in Provincetown Playhouse is further undermined by several additional instances of repetition that negate the singularity of the utterance, such as the repeated mention of the number 19. As with many of the symbols in

Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, likewise a postmodern text that challenges the possibility of arriving at an overarching truth, the iteration of the number 19 serves here only to dispel its authority as a constative reference by substituting iteration for referentiality. Although

288 “the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked” (Austin, [1962] 1990: 14). 289 “The spatio-temporal exploration of a character who is interned.”

225 we are given the precise spatial and temporal coordinates of the drama, the ubiquity of the number 19 cautions us against putting any credence in these details. The reader’s futile hermeneutic quest is in fact recapitulated by the judge, who in his own interrogation addresses the iteration directly:

CHARLES CHARLES 38290: Le chiffre 19 revient souvent dans le texte. CHARLES CHARLES 19: Dix-neuf coups de couteau, oui. CHARLES CHARLES 38: Pourquoi dix-neuf? Pourquoi ce chiffre revient-il si souvent? CHARLES CHARLES 19: C’était le 19 juillet 1919 et ce soir-là je fêtais mes 19 ans. CHARLES CHARLES 38: Pouvez-vous m’expliquer le rapport? CHARLES CHARLES 19: Y en a pas. (37)291

This dialogue constitutes yet another incursion of the metatext into the body of the text, this time even more radical as it speaks to the very structure of the narrative the audience encounters.

Charles Charles’s explanatory logic is tautological: the number 19 reappears because it reappears. It is also worth noting that he provides this explanation to a version of himself who is precisely 19 years older, situating this admittedly meaningless coincidence at the very heart of his identity. From this exchange, the reader/viewer of Provincetown Playhouse can extrapolate that if there is no intradiegetic significance of the number 19, there is correspondingly no conclusion to be drawn from its extradiegetic appearances in details such as the age gap between the protagonists or the total number of tableaux in the play. While undermining the constative

290 Charles Charles 38 is incarnating the judge in this scene. 291 CHARLES CHARLES 38: The number 19 reappears frequently in the text. CHARLES CHARLES 19: Nineteen blows of the knife, yes. CHARLES CHARLES 38: Why nineteen? Why does this number reappear so frequently? CHARLES CHARLES 19: It was July 19, 1919, and that night I was celebrating my 19th birthday. CHARLES CHARLES 38: Can you explain the relationship to me? CHARLES CHARLES 19: There is none.

226 value of the text by infusing it with an impossible numerical coincidence, the proliferation of the number 19 functions as a more general critique of our desire to impose a logical rubric on the play; the extension of this critique is an attack on the rational bias inherent in a logocentric worldview. Charles Charles stymies the judge’s attempt successfully to perform one of “les rituels majeurs dont on attend la production de vérité” (Foucault, 1976: 78)292 by producing, instead of truth, yet another affirmation of meaninglessness. The play offers up the number 19 as a possible rubric for interpretation, only to reveal, subsequently, that this seeming coherence is yet another “fausse piste” (Godin, 1985: 115),293 a “cohérence fautive” (85).294

Many scholars have signalled the importance of Chaurette’s idiosyncratic concept of

“cohérence fautive,” which appears in one of the excerpts from the Mémoires, (“Ce qui caractérisait d’abord et avant tout notre vie de cette époque-là, c’était la cohérence fautive”

[85])295 and which can be translated as “‘erroneous’ or ‘faulty’ coherence.”296 This enigmatic turn of phrase is clearly central to Chaurette’s critique of what Derrida terms “la Raison (en général)” (1967b: 58).297 It finds its most direct expression in the trials of Alvan and Winslow

(Tableaux 11-17), who are wrongfully convicted on the basis of erroneous logic. In Winslow’s

292 “the most highly valued techniques for producing truth” (Foucault, [1978] 1990: 59). 293 “wrong track.” 294 Charles Charles’s claim for the meaninglessness of the ubiquitous number 19 is a notable departure from the standard depiction of madness as an over-investiture of significance in otherwise anodyne details. Both Les images and Aurelia contain episodes where their protagonists fixate on particular numbers that they are convinced foretell their doom (Bouchard, 1985: 15; Nerval, 1944: 31). Drawing on the latter text, Felman can thus claim that “Madness is, before all else, an intuition about the functioning of the symbol, a blind and total faith in the revelation of a sign which, although spawned by chance, harkens to a necessity, a fatality” (2003: 71). The madness of Provincetown Playhouse, by contrast, is predicated on the systematic evacuation of meaning from the sign itself, as well as from the strategies by which meaning is made. 295 “Above all else, that which characterized our lives during that period was a faulty coherence.” 296 Cf. Pascal Riendeau’s eponymous book title, La cohérence fautive: L’hybridité textuelle dans l’oeuvre de Normand Chaurette (1997), as well as the discussions of Godin (1985: 116) and Nutting (2000:468), to name but a selection. 297 “reason (in general)” (1978: 36).

227 case, much is made of the correlation between the fact that the murdered child was black and that he had been seen fighting with a black man on the beach that same morning:

CHARLES CHARLES 19: Avouez-le. C’est vous qui avez mis l’enfant dans le sac! WINSLOW: DES PREUVES! AVEZ-VOUS SEULEMENT DES PREUVES? CHARLES CHARLES 19: Oui, Winslow Byron. Nous avons des preuves. [...] CHARLES CHARLES 19: L’enfant était noir. (93)298

This exchange can be contrasted with Charles Charles’s assertion of the lack of significance of the number 19 in the fourth tableau. Here, the attempt to make the information cohere results in the elevation of a coincidence to the status of proof. Aware of the compelling nature of such a neat theory, Alvan protests,“Ça vous plairait, hein, de mêler le racisme dans tout ça?” (83)299

The intense pressure to confess recalls Peter Brooks’s assertion that “confessions rarely are products of a free and rational will. They arise in situations of constraint, whether physical or psychological” (2000: 63). It moreover illustrates Foucault’s concept of the “production” of truth: the judicial authority “se fabriquera une vérité, à même la minceur et les trous du tissu narratif qui lui aura été fourni” (Godin, 1981: 12),300 compounding the pressure to confess by its absolute faith in an explanation that appears to be entirely logical.

298 CHARLES CHARLES 19: Admit it. It’s you who put the child in the bag! WINSLOW: PROOF! DO YOU HAVE EVEN HAVE PROOF? CHARLES CHARLES 19: Yes, Winslow Byron. We have proof. [...] CHARLES CHARLES 19: The child was black. 299 “You’d like that, eh, to add racism to the mix?” 300 “will create for itself a truth from the thinness and the holes in the narrative fabric that have been provided.”

228

Alvan attempts to signal the arbitrary nature of the court’s conclusion by demonstrating how, if properly narrativized, any mundane detail could be made the basis for an accusation of culpability, implying that ‘truth’ is the product of power rather than empirical evidence:

ALVAN: Pourquoi nous accuser? C’est vous qu’on devrait interroger, vous demander des alibis! des mobiles! vos emplois du temps! l’horaire des trains! vos empreintes digitales! les cigarettes que vous fumez! vos idées marginales! tout ce qui peut vous compromettre! tout! tout! tout!... (83).301

In his refusal to confess, Winslow touches on the violence inherent in the judicial system:

WINSLOW: JE SUIS INNOCENT! Jamais, vous entendez, jamais vous me ferez avouer. Pendez-moi, donnez-moi des coups de couteau dans le ventre, mais jamais je vous dirai que j’ai tué (95).302

Significantly, he posits as punishment both the same violent act of which he himself stands accused as well as the hanging that, of course, he ultimately suffers. The law thus becomes indistinguishable from the crimes it is putatively meant to arbitrate, illustrating a point Derrida makes very clearly regarding the force implicit in the enactment of law: “il n’y a pas [...] d’applicablité ou d’‘enforceability’ de la loi sans force, que cette force soit directe ou non, physique ou symbolique, extérieure ou intérieure, brutale ou subtilement discursive et herméneutique, coercitive ou régulative, etc.” (Derrida, 1990: 926).303 While this threat of power

301 ALVAN: Why accuse us? It’s you we should interrogate, you we should be asking for alibis, cell numbers, your timetables, the schedule of the trains, your fingerprints, the cigarettes you smoke, your marginal ideas, anything that could compromise you! Everything! Everything! Everything! 302 WINSLOW: I AM INNOCENT! Never, do you hear me, never, will you make me confess. Hang me, stab me in the stomach, but I will never tell you that I killed. 303 “there is [...] no applicability or enforceability of the law without force, whether this force be direct or indirect, physical or symbolic, exterior or interior, brutal or subtly discursive and hermeneutic, coercive or regulative, and so forth” (Derrida, 1990: 925-927).

229 most immediately describes the legal system as such, its application extends to the enforcement of social norms, which, as Judith Butler makes plain, are likewise underwritten by implicit power dynamics. The “rule-governed discourses that govern the intelligible invocation of identity”

(Butler, [1990] 2008: 185) determine which subject positions are admissible within a normative social discourse.304 Viewed in this light, the indeterminacy of Charles Charles 38’s subject position as well as the multiple interruptions to the play’s constative referentiality are clearly attacks on the power that determines social intelligibility. Another important challenge will be posed directly by Winslow and Alvan as they refuse to recall their whereabouts during the significant interval between six and seven p.m. Although they maintain that they are victims of their faulty memory, Charles Charles 19 indicates that perhaps their silence was slightly more calculated:

CHARLES CHARLES 19: Il y avait pourtant un tas de choses à faire entre six et sept, un soir de juillet... Ils auraient pu inventer n’importe quoi... mais ils ont préféré se taire. (107)305

304 To the extent that Provincetown Playhouse can be labelled a queer text, it is insofar as its critique of normativity can be applied to homosexual identity politics. Chagnon accordingly posits that “les accusés sont homosexuels, donc transgressant d’emblée, jusque dans l’utilisation de leur corps, la norme sociale qui calibre la jouissance et l’aligne sur la suite du monde, c’est-à-dire, d’abord, sur la reproduction des structures dejà en place” (1981: 12). [“the accused are homosexuals, thus transgressing from the outset, with their very bodies, the social norm that calibrates pleasure and aligns it with the future, that is to say, primarily, with the reproduction of existing structures.”] While Chaurette has downplayed the homosexual content of Provincetown Playhouse, (“l'explication homosexuelle ne fait que servir une intrigue policière à la fin” [Riendeau, 2000: 438] [“The homosexual explanation serves only the police drama at the end”), it is clear that a critique of normative discourse is an undeniable undercurrent. It is also worth pointing out a thematic similarity between Provincetown Playhouse and several other notable works by queer Québécois playrights. René-Daniel Dubois’s play Being at Home with Claude (1985) also dramatizes a police interrogation regarding a murder, in this instance perpetrated by a male prostitute against his same-sex partner. Michel Marc Bouchard’s Les feluettes (1987) (famously adapted into a film by John Greyson under its English title, Lilies [1996]) similarly features a suspicious death, and like Provincetown Playhouse, a false conviction based on insufficient evidence. While the restricted scope of this study precludes a sustained investigation into the relationship between these three plays, their shared appeal to themes of murder, interrogation, and confession speaks to the relevance of these motifs within a homosexual context, and necessitates further inquiry. 305 CHARLES CHARLES 19: There were nevertheless a ton of things to do between six and seven, on a night in July... They could have invented anything... but they preferred to remain silent.

230

Their conviction results not from conclusive evidence against them but rather as punishment for their failure to provide a coherent explanation (or a false confession) to the court: in other words, to speak intelligibly within its discourse. As Godin rightly points out, in denying the court an intelligible confession, “les personnages sont coupables d’avoir interrompu, par leur silence, la parole opératoire du pouvoir justicier” (Godin, 1981: 13).306 Godin’s observation, as well as

Winslow’s analogy between the two violences, reveal the power by which norms are maintained.

If Alvan and Winslow’s refusal to confess can be regarded as a challenge to the discursive norms that govern the courtroom, their insubordination echoes the originary transgression perpetrated by Charles Charles 19 in his enactment of a real murder on stage. In his memoirs and elsewhere, Charles Charles himself makes the analogy between the laws of the court and those of the theatre in his repeated identification of his public as “juges attentifs”

(51)307: “J’ai écrit ma pièce [...] pour un public venu spécialement pour me juger” (99),308 he affirms. Like Alvan and Winslow, however, Charles Charles 19 will interrupt the discursive norms of his stage through the insertion of a dramatic action that is not intelligible within its established parameters. In his analysis, Austin carves out a particular place for the performative utterances that take place in the theatre, stating that a speech act is “in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage” ([1962] 1990: 22). In other words, there is a certain kind of infelicity deliberately built into the performance of theatre: in a play, he states, language is “used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use” (Austin, [1962] 1990: 22). This logic can be extended to theatrical action: Charles Charles 19’s placement of a real child, a non-actor, on stage, violates the theatrical pact by introducing constative reality into the domain of artifice.

306 “the characters are guilty of having interrupted, by their silence, the operative speech of judicial power.” 307 “attentive judges.” 308 “I wrote my play [...] for a public who came specially to judge me.”

231

The reality of violence represents a particular form of transgression, as Josette Féral describes very clearly in a passage cited by Riendeau:

[...] en attaquant son corps propre (ou celui d’un animal mis à mort), l’acteur détruit les conditions de la théâtralité. Il n’est plus désormais dans l’altérité du théâtre. En se mutilant, le performeur a rejoint le réel et son acte, en dehors des règles, des codes, ne peut plus être perçu comme illusion, comme fiction, comme jeu. (in Riendeau, 1997: 87)309

The real murder of a child is, dramatically-speaking, infelicitous, insofar as it fails to respect the inherently imitative nature of the genre.

Charles Charles 19’s association of his “théâtre de la vérité” (35) with ancient Greek tragedy further underscores the infelicity. “Le théâtre doit renouer avec la tradition grecque,”310 he proclaims to the judge in his defence (46); he then goes on to connect L’immolation to the story of the child Astyanax, slain during the sacking of Troy (46-47). Charles Charles 38’s reference is fairly esoteric, given that this story does not occupy a prominent place within the

Greek tradition. Astyanax, son of Hector and Andromache, is mentioned by Homer in the sixth book of the Iliad; the account of his death, however, is given by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, where we learn that when Troy fell, “Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, threw him from the wall, saying to Andromache, ‘Since my father killed his father he might try to avenge the death. He also could become King of Troy, and we want no more kings of Troy!’” (Lindemans, [1997]

2006). Arguably, Charles Charles 38’s main intertext is in fact Racine’s version of events as recounted in his play Andromaque (1667). Racine gives Astyanax a more prominent role,

309 “[...] in attacking his own body (or that of an animal put to death), the actor destroys the conditions of theatricality. He is thus no longer in the alterity of the theatre. In mutilating himself, the performer has rejoined reality, and his act, outside of the rules, the codes, can no longer be perceived as illusion, as fiction, as game.” 310 “The theatre has to reconnect with the Greek tradition.”

232 modifying the story such that the boy is actually saved when Ulysses is tricked into killing another child in his stead:

ORESTE: [...] J’entends de tous côtés qu’on menace Pyrrhus

Toute la Grèce éclate en murmures confus ;

On se plaint qu’oubliant son sang et sa promesse

Il élève en sa cour l’ennemi de la Grèce,

Astyanax, d’Hector jeune et malheureux fils,

Reste de tant de rois sous Troie ensevelis.

J’apprends que pour ravir son enfance au supplice

Andromaque trompa l’ingénieux Ulysse,

Tandis qu’un autre enfant, arraché de ses bras,

Sous le nom de son fils fut conduit au trépas. (I.i: 67-76)311

Charles Charles 38’s instruction to the judge, “Relisez vos classiques” (46), is clearly directing him toward this particular classic of the French theatrical tradition. There are many parallels to be made between Racine’s Astyanax and Charles Charles 19’s Théâtre de l’immolation de la beauté; the latter play in fact draws its name from a line of Racine’s text:

PYRRHUS: Ah! si du fils d’Hector la perte était jurée,

Pourquoi d’un an entier l’avons-nous différée?

311 Orestes: [...]The talk was all of Pyrrhus; on every side The Greeks deplored a king who in his pride Forgetful of his blood and fealty, Rears at his court all Hellas’ enemy, Astyanax, Hector’s young and luckless boy, Sole remnant of the buried kings of Troy, Andromache, they told me, had beguiled The sly Ulysses, so as to save her child: Another infant, torn from her embrace, Was thought her son, and slaughtered in his place. (1982: 9)

233

Dans le sein de Priam n’a-t-on pu l’immoler? (I.ii: 205-207)312

Charles Charles 38 solidifies this connection through his insistence on the word “immolation” to describe the death of the child:

CHARLES CHARLES 38: L’immolation. Dites ‘immolation’, s’il vous plaît...

CHARLES CHARLES 19: Le juge: “À l’heure actuelle, j’ai bien peur qu’il s’agisse d’un crime.”

CHARLES CHARLES 38: L’auteur: “Immolation. Le théâtre doit renouer avec la tradition grecque. L’enfant s’appelait Astyanax. [...]” (45-46)313

In both cases, a child functions as a pawn in an adult game of romantic entanglement:

Astyanax’s survival is contingent on Andromache’s agreeing to marry Pyrrhus, her captor.

Similarly, Charles Charles orchestrates the murder of the child Frank Anshutz to punish his lover for having an affair. However, whereas Astyanax escapes death twice, first through

Andromache’s sly substitution and subsequently through her choice of self-sacrifice,314 Charles

Charles 19 performs a substitution that sees a real child placed inside the bag and stabbed,

312 Come now! If Hector’s son was meant to die, Why have we spared him one whole year, and why Was he not put to death on Priam’s breast [...]? (1981: 15) 313 CHARLES CHARLES 38: Immolation. Say ‘immolation’, please. CHARLES CHARLES 19: The juge: “At the present moment, I fear that it is in fact a crime.” CHARLES CHARLES 38: The author: “Immolation. The theatre has to reconnect with the Greek tradition. The child was named Astyanax. 314 Andromache decides that she will consent to marry Pyrrhus in order to extract his promise of protection for her son Astyanax, but will subsequently kill herself, so unbearable is the idea of marrying her enemy. On the day of the wedding, just as Pyrrhus is crowning her Queen and naming her son the legitimate heir to his throne, a Greek mob rises up and kills the king, making Andromache the de facto monarch.

234 instead of the intended cotton wadding. This substitution of real horror in the place of its imitation is a significant violation of principles of decorum that defined both the French and the ancient Greek stage. For Racine, the principle of bienséance [‘propriety’/’decorum’] dictated that

“rien ne doit choquer les spectateurs: [...] pas de violence dans les actions—sauf à l’extérieur de la scène, rapportées par des récits—ni dans le discours, toujours contrôlé, même dans le bouleversement affectif, la fureur passionnelle, ou le délire” (Rohou, 2000:17).315 The other classical tradition invoked by Charles Charles 38’s reference to Astyanax, namely that of ancient

Greece, is similarly characterized by catharsis, which Aristotle defines in the Poetics as “the proper purgation” of the pity and fear aroused through the “imitation of an action” (1.6). The ability to divest oneself of one’s pent-up anxiety is predicated on the underlying security one has in the knowledge that theatre is merely an “imitation”; Aristotle uses this word over and over, stating very clearly that “tragic imitation implies persons acting” (1.6).316 By moving the

“immolation” to centre stage, Charles Charles 38 deliberately subverts the very classical tradition regarding which he chides the judge for being misinformed; his use of the story of Astyanax is yet another confirmation of the extent to which his dramatic practice defies theatrical, and by extension social, norms.317

315 “nothing must shock the spectators: [...] no violence in the actions, except offstage, recounted by way of narrative; neither in speech, which was always controlled, even in situations of emotional upheaval, passionate fury, or delirium.” 316 Although the Aristotelian understanding of the role of the theatre was, in the 20th century, called into question by Brecht’s formulation of a theatre of alienation rather than identification, the reference to Aristotle is warranted by Charles Charles 19’s stated desire to connect his practice to the classical tradition. 317 It is important to note that Charles Charles 19/38 deconstructs even the method of Bertolt Brecht, who revolutionized the modern stage through his dismantling of classical convention. Brechtian “epic” theatre was predicated on dispelling the theatrical illusion in order to prevent the audience from being lulled into simple identification with the characters and situations on stage. His use of techniques of alienation was meant to ensure that the audience maintained their critical disposition at all times. Brecht was as such very critical of method acting: “Aiming not to put his audience in a trance,” he wrote, “[the actor] must not go into a trance himself [...] At no moment must he go so far as to be wholly transformed into the character played” (1948: 9). The orchestration of a real murder on stage being arguably one of the most definitive violations of this principle, it is clear that Brecht is

235

In addition to being an “abuse” (Austin [1962] 1990: 16) of dramatic procedure, the onstage murder of the child can moreover be regarded as doubly infelicitous insofar as it is received by the audience as imitative rather than real: “Vous comprenez,” Winslow testifies, “un meurtre au théâtre a jamais le même impact qu’un meurtre dans la vie, alors même si on avait annoncé au début que le sac contenait un enfant et que l’on éventrerait, c’était rien d’encourageant” (76).318 So powerful is the expectation that the stage correspond to the realm of illusion that even the slaughter of an innocent child can go unrecognized. The irony is compounded by the fact that the “hurleuse” (“screamer”) planted in the audience, whose job was to scream “aux endroits prévus,”319 was lulled to sleep by the “hermétique”320 quality of the play and thus remained silent at its climax (45). In one of the most overtly humourous of the play’s exhanges, we get the following dialogue between Charles Charles 19 (incarnating “le juge”) and

Charles Charles 38 (playing the role of “l’auteur”):

CHARLES CHARLES 38: ...On s’était payé une hurleuse. Dans la troisième rangée. Cinquante sous pour la soirée. Elle devait hurler aux endroits prévus. Alvan devait lui faire signe, comme ça... CHARLES CHARLES 19: Elle a hurlé? CHARLES CHARLES 38: Au début, elle hurlait assez régulièrement. CHARLES CHARLES 19: Et à la fin, durant les dix-neuf coups de couteau?

yet another theatrical forebear whose practice Provincetown Playhouse deconstructs. It is however equally incorrect to regard L’immolation as espousing the principles of method acting: although Charles Charles mentions in his memoirs that the famous practitioner Lee Strasberg was in the audience (51), the violation of the theatrical pact, as previously stated, moves L’immolation outside the world of artifice altogether. 318 “You understand, a murder in the theatre never has the same impact as a murder in real life, so even if we had announced at the beginning that the bag contained a child and that we would disembowel it, it wasn’t anything encouraging.” 319 “at predetermined moments.” 320 The literal translation of this word is “hermetic,” in the sense of “esoteric”.

236

CHARLES CHARLES 38: La pièce était assez hermétique, je dois dire. La hurleuse s’est endormie.321

The irruption of the reality of slumber prevented her from playing her role, which, had she screamed, would have placed her in the same position as the actors: feigning a horror she should rightly have been experiencing, were it not for the strength of the theatrical pact.

Although the circumstances are perverse, Charles Charles 19’s actions thus provide an object lesson in the power of discursive context that is particularly salient given the play’s engagement with madness. Recall Derrida’s point that there is no position from which to speak on behalf of the mad, for “quand on veut dire leur silence lui-même, on est déjà passé à l’ennemi et du côté de l’ordre” (1967b: 58).322 Charles Charles 19 encounters the huis-clos of “la Raison

(en général)” in his inability to forewarn his audience of his own madness:

CHARLES CHARLES 19: Mesdames et Messieurs, la pièce que vous allez voir est l’oeuvre d’un jeune auteur dangeureusement malade. Il est encore temps pour vous de sortir (29).323

His words, however, will inevitably be perceived by the audience as continuous with the artifice of the play. This aporia becomes the subject of the judge’s324 subsequent investigation as he attempts to ascertain the legitimacy of the playwright’s professed insanity:

321 CHARLES CHARLES 38: ...We’d paid a screamer. In the third row. Fifty cents for the evening. She was supposed to scream at pre-designated times. Alvan was supposed to give her a sign, like this... CHARLES CHARLES 19: Did she scream? CHARLES CHARLES 38: At the beginning, she was screaming fairly regularly. CHARLES CHARLES 19: And at the end, during the nineteen knife-blows? CHARLES CHARLES 38: The play was pretty esoteric, I have to say. The screamer fell asleep. 322 “when one attempts to convey their silence itself, one has already passed over to the side of the enemy, the side of order” (Derrida, 1978: 36). 323 “Ladies and gentlemen, the play that you’re about to see is the work of a young author who is dangerously ill. There is still time for you to leave.”

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CHARLES CHARLES 38: Maintenez-vous toujours que vous êtes fou? Charles Charles 19 acquiesce d’un signe de tête. CHARLES CHARLES 38: En quoi êtes-vous fou? CHARLES CHARLES 19, après réflexion: ...J’écris des pièces que seul un fou peut écrire! CHARLES CHARLES 38: Un exemple, s’il vous plaît! Un exemple concret. CHARLES CHARLES 19: Y en a pas. À proprement parler, y en a pas. Chaque réplique isolée est pleine de bon sens, y compris celle qui a été dite durant qu’on éventrait l’enfant, je veux dire pendant qu’on immolait la victime. Vous voyez, c’est seulement quand les spectateurs se retrouvent dans la rue, apres la pièce, qu’ils prennent conscience subitement qu’ils viennent d’assister à l’oeuvre d’un fou. (36)325

The judge’s attempt to elicit a confession of madness is thwarted by the rational basis of communication. The determining nature of theatrical convention now appears, in the light of this exchange, as a metaphor for the conditions that occasion the possibility of speech more generally: in the same way that it proves difficult for an actor to convince the audience that an on-stage action is not part of the play, it is likewise impossible for a subject to communicate a position that is not intelligible within the rules that govern discourse. It is for this reason,

Foucault argues, that madness has been reduced to “silence” (1972: 56). The mad subject cannot

324 In this scene, Charles Charles 38 is incarnating the figure of the judge. 325 CHARLES CHARLES 38: Do you still maintain that you’re mad? Charles Charles 19 nods in acquiescence. CHARLES CHARLES 38: In what capacity are you mad? CHARLES CHARLES 19, après réflexion: ...I write plays that only a madman could write! CHARLES CHARLES 38: An example, please! A concrete example. CHARLES CHARLES 19: There isn’t one. Strictly speaking, there isn’t one. Each isolated reply is reasonable, including that which was given while we were disembowelling the child, I mean, while we were immolating the victim. You see, it’s only when the spectators find themselves in the street, after the play, that they suddenly realize that they just witnessed the work of a madman.

238 confess, because confession is predicated on “a verbal act of self-recognition” (Brooks, 2000: 2) that is of course unavailable to one for whom “unconscious processes predominate over conscious ones to the extent that they control them” (Feder, 1980: 5). Charles Charles 19’s confession is “impossible” in the additional sense that the audience will never truly hear it, attuned as they are to the conventions of the stage.

If Derrida and Foucault are right that madness is the silenced subject position par excellence, Charles Charles 38’s account of his murder and trial can be regarded as both diagnostic and corrective of this erasure: the failure of audience and actors alike to recognize the crime demonstrates the determining influence of institutional norms, while Charles Charles 19’s radical action constitutes a definitive irruption of the irrational into the domain of artistic contrivance. As Felman points out in the case of Gérard de Nerval, who undertook very explicitly to deny his madness on the grounds that it proved antithetical to his literary authority

(Felman, 1978: 60), there is a strong societal demarcation between madness and artistic productivity. Foucault is likewise very explicit about this perceived incompatibility in his assertion that “[l]a folie est absolue rupture de l’oeuvre; elle forme le moment constitutif d’une abolition” (1972: 556).326 Rather than denying his madness, by contrast, Charles Charles 38’s madness becomes the precondition for his art: the nineteen tableaux that make up Provincetown

Playhouse are literally predicated on it, insofar as the text we encounter is the product of his mind. His art, however, will be characterized by infelicity: L’immolation, his self-proclaimed masterpiece, is an “oeuvre injouable” that will be “montée quand même” (27).327 Beyond being

326 “[m]adness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition” ([1965] 1988: 287). 327 “unplayable work” that will be “staged nevertheless.” That these words regarding L’immolation recall Gilles Chagnon’s assertion of the unplayability of Provincetown Playhouse is no accident, for Chaurette’s critique of Reason is present at every level of the text.

239 impossible to stage, L’immolation is self-cannibalizing insofar as its programme of “immolating beauty” results in the destruction of its actors, “trois garçons aux cheveux blonds tout juste bons

à être beaux” (25),328 as well as the sanity and career of its playwright. This infelicity can be read as a critique of an aesthetic that, as we have seen, “symbolizes morality” (Danto, 2003: 40); for the Romantics, as Keats famously summarized, beauty and truth are one and the same.329

Whereas Elizabeth Smart’s narrator strategically mobilizes the Romantic equation to legitimate her affair, Charles Charles 19, by contrast, commits a deplorable murder in order to signal his radical break with conventional values.330

The on-stage murder of a child, the ultimate act of theatrical infelicity, can accordingly be regarded as the metaphorical embodiment of Chaurette’s critique of normative discourse. While it is much easier to assess Provincetown Playhouse in terms of its deconstruction of theatrical aesthetics, it is in fact possible to trace the continuity of his project with Antonin Artaud’s concept of the Théâtre de la cruauté, which has likewise been called an “impossible” theatre

(Finter, 1997: 18). Critical of the complacency and passivity that he believed were entailed by classical, mimetic theatre, Artaud attempted to develop an alternate form of theatre based on

“performative doing” (Finter, 1997: 16) rather than representation. A famous performance at

Paris’s Vieux Colombier in 1947 displays some of its core principles:

As witnesses reported, the evening took place according to plan until Artaud, having read the poems, which had duly impressed everyone, began to read his life story from a manuscript, from which he soon deviated into free speech. Finally,

328 “Three boys with blonde hair just good at being beautiful.” 329 The final lines of Keats’s famous poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” summarize the Romantic philosophy: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’” (l. 49-50) 330 This is not to say, however, that the annihilation of beauty is tantamount to the death of art: consider, for example, Damien Hirst’s multiple pieces made from animals killed explicitly for artistic purposes, including the shark of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) or the 9000 dead butterflies of In and Out of Love (2012).

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after he could no longer find his place among the manuscript pages and began gathering the pages that were scattered across the stage, he broke off, and, confused, was gently escorted away by André Gide after the three-hour performance. (Finter, 1997: 16)

Artaud’s goal was to replace theatrical mimeticism with a “manifestation of the Real” (Finter,

1997: 18). The “cruelty” on which this performance rests is not necessarily violence per se, but rather the paring away of the theatrical veneer to arrive at an authentic experience. Thus, while many saw the Vieux Colombier performance as “the unbearable exhibition of a mental patient,”

Artaud considered it an “unprecedented attempt at exploding the boundaries of a theatrical event” (Finter, 1997: 17). This intervention recalls Charles Charles 19’s own attempt to “explode the boundaries” of theatre: indeed, the description of Artaud surrounded by scattered pages of his memoir evokes very nearly the stage pictures created by Fortin, of Charles Charles 38 walled-in by reams of paper, literally playing within his text. In both cases, what is understood under the sign of ‘madness’ is a deliberate subversion of a mimetic understanding of the stage. Derrida applauds Artaud’s attempt to defy “l’intention logique et discursive [...] par laquelle la parole ordinairement assure sa transparence rationnelle” (1967b: 351-352),331 citing it as the only possible corrective to the hegemonic rationalism and logocentrism that have characterized the

Western theatrical tradition: “la scène,” he writes, “ne viendra plus répéter un présent, re- présenter un présent qui serait ailleurs et avant elle, dont la plénitude serait plus vieille qu’elle, absente de la scène et pouvant en droit se passer d’elle: présence à soi du Logos absolu, présent

331 “the logical and discursive intentions which speech ordinarily uses in order to ensure its rational transparency” (1978: 240)

241 vivant de Dieu” (1967b: 348).332 Like Artaud, Charles Charles 19 attempts to stage an “oeuvre injouable” that defies the mimeticism of the Aristotelian stage; its privileging of performance over representation necessitates that it can be “montée qu’une seule fois” (27).333

This movement away from mimeticism is present in Provincetown Playhouse at macro- and microcosmic levels: both Chaurette and Charles Charles 19 are aiming for the same goals in their respective theatrical practices. The latter takes the idea of cruelty to its extreme as the symbolic “sacrifice de la beauté” (27) becomes literalized in the actual killing of a child:

CHARLES CHARLES 38: Il fallait trouver autre chose que des rituels. Le public déteste les rituels. Alors j’ai décidé d’écrire un coup de théâtre prodigieux! Sublime! Inouï! (59-60).334

The murder, however, is unscripted: as in Artaud’s performance at the Vieux Colombier, the text becomes the pretext for the unfolding of an event. The same severing of the correspondence between text and performance to an extent characterizes Chaurette’s theatrical practice, which subverts the role of the “auteur-créateur qui, absent et de loin, [...] surveille, rassemble, et commande le temps ou le sens de la représentation” (Derrida, 1967b: 345).335 Viewed in this light, the seemingly non-sensical elements of Provincetown Playhouse—its unplayable stage directions, repetitions, appendix of variant versions, and other dramatic infelicities—enact

Chaurette’s abnegation of the dictatorial role of “author-creator.” If his play is to be staged at all,

332 “The stage will no longer re-present a present that would exist elsewhere and prior to it, a present whose plenitude would be older than it, absent from it, and rightfully capable of doing without it: the being-present-to-itself of the absolute Logos, the living present of God” (1978: 237). 333 “unplayable work”; “performed but one single time.” 334 “I had to find something other than rituals. The audience hates rituals. So I decided to write a prodigious stroke of theatre! Sublime! Unheard-of!” 335 “author-creator, who, absent and from afar, [...] keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or the meaning of representation” (Derrida, 1978: 235).

242 as the striking difference between Ronfard and Fortin’s productions demonstrates, its performance will necessitate great interpretive leaps on the part of its performers as well as its audience. At the same time, however, the very fact that Provincetown Playhouse has been staged, and on multiple occasions, potentially bespeaks the impossibility of fully escaping the imposition of order and rationality that it seemingly resists. Accordingly, it is perhaps not the murder that must be regarded as the central metaphor for Chaurette’s transgressive theatrical practice, but rather the interned patient, doomed every night to revisit his putatively unrepresentable work. The question of whether it is ever possible fully to escape the bonds of rationalism remains an open one. Nevertheless, Chaurette’s text certainly poses a challenge, first, to theatrical practice, and analogously, to the entrenched conventions that determine intelligible subject positions. Madness certainly speaks in Provincetown Playouse; against Chagnon’s assertion that “[l]a folie certes parle, mais d’un lieu brisé, inquiétant, étranger (1981: 16),336 we might argue that the true madness of the play is not to be found not merely in Charles Charles’s

“broken” speech, but in the strategies by which the transparency of communication is interrupted. Madness thus appears not as an impediment to self-expression, but as the locus of a revolutionary potential to resist the “cohérence fautive” that condemns its victims to silence and death.

Conclusion

If narrative seduction consists in drawing the reader in through the performance of felicitous speech acts, textual madness, by contrast, occurs when the work fails to live up to its discursive promises. And if the purpose of seduction is to lure the reader into accepting the speaker’s worldview, the function of textual infelicity is to jolt her into questioning the assumptions that

336 “madness certainly speaks, but from a broken, unnerving, strange, place.”

243 underlie word and world alike. Felman’s characterization of madness as a “mouvement de jeu linguistique intotalisable, immaîtrisable” (1978: 347),337 rather than as a fixed pathology, resists its reduction to a signifier within a logical, logocentric economy. Whereas, in Foucault and

Derrida’s view, madness is the silenced subject position par excellence, in Felman’s, it becomes the basis for an exploration of literature’s capacity to occasion alternative forms of representation. Gérard de Nerval’s simultaneous embrace and rejection of his madness is paradigmatic in this regard: by ‘disowning’ his madness without ‘denying’ it, he opens a liminal space between the rational and the irrational, a space that becomes the grounds for a re- examination of the discourses of health and illness, sanity and insanity.

The question of “qui parle dans le récit d’Aurélia, et à partir de quel lieu” (Felman, 1978:

67)338 is the same that must be asked of Les images and Provincetown Playhouse. Both of these texts feature a speaker who simultaneously affirms and denies his or her madness. Isaac’s folie alternates between affliction and affectation, such that it is never entirely clear whether her discourse is allied to reason or unreason. Her rhetorical univocity is further dispelled by means of a variety of devices of deferral, including multiple subject positions and contradictory utterances, which prevent us as readers from acting on our diagnostic impulses. Likewise Charles Charles

38, while seemingly given over entirely to madness, simultaneously confesses that his plea of insanity was calculated to avoid punishment. In his case as well, the proliferation of subject positions and infelicitous speech acts prevent us from attaching his confessional discourse to a fixed reality, divorcing the confessional act from Foucauldian pouvoir-savoir. The instability that characterizes the discursive positions of the speakers is present throughout both texts, each of

337 “movement of non-totalizable, ungovernable linguistic play” (Felman, 2003: 252). 338 “Who speaks in the narrative of Aurélia and from what discursive position” (2003: 66).

244 which rests on an impossible or self-undermining premise: the former is a letter that will never be sent, the latter, the disjointed contents of the protagonist’s mind. The staging of these

“impossible” confessions becomes analogous to the subversion of the powerful social norms that, as Foucault argues in his Histoire de la folie, keep madness confined to the “silence” of the institution. These texts compel us to reinterrogate the impenetrable walls that separate reason from unreason: the impossibility of situating them firmly inside or outside of madness challenges this binaristic opposition, revealing the “chose hurlante” that lies beneath every carefully-styled subject.

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Conclusion

Impossible Confessions

The “impossibility” that characterizes the texts discussed in the previous chapter can in fact be extended to encompass confessional discourse as a whole. While the representation of madness functions as a limit-case, the difficulty of speaking about the “authentic self” (Krondorfer, 2010:

19) is detectable in every instance of confession and can be traced all the way back to its literary forefather, St. Augustine. Augustine opens the Confessions with an avowal of his uncertainty as to how to “find words” (I.v) to undertake his project. He likewise expresses concern that, from a very young age, he finds himself troublingly adept in “the art of using my tongue to gain access to human honours and to acquire deceitful riches” (I.ix). Lurking beneath Augustine’s conscious awareness of the perils of narrative manipulation are a variety of additional factors that, unbeknownst to its writer, give shape to his text. Linda Anderson argues that the Confessions is heavily reliant on intertextual sources: she re-reads the famous tolle lege scene with an eye to its literary influences, concluding that Augustine’s account of conversion is not simply a singular event, but rather participates in “an endless act of reading and reinterpretation” ([2001] 2011: 23) insofar as it draws from “Jewish, pagan and Christian traditions, all of which would have been known to [him] as a teacher of rhetoric” ([2001] 2011: 23). Anderson’s analysis bears out the same insight that emerges in Paul de Man’s deconstruction of Rousseau: namely, the impossibility of a writer’s ever fully grasping the entirety of his influences and subconscious motivations. Augustine’s indebtedness to literature troubles the classification of his work as pure

‘non-fiction’. Although the Confessions is generally regarded as autobiography, it is arguably guilty of the same crime as James Frey’s excoriated Million Little Pieces. We might say that these texts differ in degree rather than in kind: instead of drawing a hard and fast distinction

246 between truth and invention, it would be more accurate to locate all instances of self-disclosure on a continuum situated between these two poles.

If identity is regarded as a discursive construct rather than an essential quality, the intertext can be seen to play a critical role in the subject’s attempt to articulate herself. The confessions of the past several chapters have occurred within “un espace à dimensions multiples, où se marient et se contestent des écritures variées, dont aucune n’est originelle” (Barthes, 1994:

493-494).339 The Confessional poets, we noted, made extensive reference to figures from mythology and literature as a means of delving into their own psyches: Sylvia Plath’s poem

“Lady Lazarus” is but one of many examples of archetypal figures deployed in the service of self-definition. Within the genre of fiction, it is possible to find instances of intertextuality in virtually every work previously considered: Offred is constantly negotiating identity positions drawn from a variety of sources ranging from pop culture to the Bible. The narrators of Smart and Bouchard’s texts draw much of their material from this latter repository, defining themselves and the people around them in biblical/mythological terms. Conversely, while intertexts can help the subject begin to articulate an identity, it is important to signal their potential to interfere with the process of self-definition. This deferral of the subject can be understood as a product of Rita

Felski’s “dialectic of intimacy and alienation,” which is set in motion, we recall, when “the act of confession […] engender[s] a dialectic in which the production of ever more writing as a means to defining a center of meaning merely serves to underscore the alienation of the subject even as it seeks to overcome it” (1989: 104). Although Felski does not address intertextuality directly, it is evident that the negotiation of competing narratives regarding the self results in the same problematic deferral of identity. Isaac’s perpetual oscillation between the embrace and rejection

339 “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (Barthes, 1977: 146).

247 of her various avatars is emblematic in this regard: no sooner has she announced her kinship with

Isaac or Jephte’s daughter than she feels compelled to dissociate herself from an aspect of the story that cannot adequately convey her experience. Her ultimate decision to discard her letter outright represents her awareness of the inability of writing to do justice to the complexity of the subject.

While the irruption of intertextuality showcases the intervention of narrative in the act of self-disclosure, Anderson draws our attention to yet another way in which confession involves a process of mediation: “Augustine’s dilemma as an autobiographer,” she writes, “is how to get through language to a state of transcendent unity with himself while writing in a language which works through material signs” ([2001] 2011: 22). Her point reveals the logocentric assumptions by which the confession is underpinned: first, that language is merely a conduit to the communication of truth, and as such should be “as transparent as possible” (Culler, 2009: 9).

Likewise implicit in the ‘dilemma’ she identifies is the idea of writing as a “supplément dangereux” (Derrida, 1972: 126) to the plenitude of speech. According to Derrida, writing is considered suspect because it interposes a layer of mediation between the subject and his discourse: the very action that is meant to communicate his individual truth simultaneously forecloses the possibility of total access. The integrity of the auricular confession is already threatened by the difficulty of articulating the self; however, as Culler elucidates, the written confession bears the additional burden of existing at yet one more layer of remove from the speaker: “speech has seemed the immediate manifestation or presence of thought, while writing, which operates in the absence of the speaker, has been treated as an artificial and derivative representation of speech, a potentially misleading sign of a sign” (Culler, 2000: 9). This hierarchical view of writing as secondary to speech can be traced back to Plato, who regarded all forms of representation as derivative from the essential truth, which he termed “the Good”

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(Demos, 1937: 245). Christianity inherited these ideas by way of the neoplatonists, locating God as the primary source and the Bible as a secondary record of his communication.

It is precisely this hierarchy at which Provincetown Playhouse and The Martyrology take aim: both works emphasize the materiality of language as a corrective to the logocentrism that, influenced by Christian thinking, privileges speech over writing and regards language as the conduit to truth. Chaurette reacts against these metanarratives by conflating the constative and performative modes, such that it becomes impossible to distinguish the content of an utterance from the act of enunciation. Furthermore, his elision of text and metatext prevents us from determining whether we are witnessing the play itself or a commentary on that play; Pierre

Fortin’s decision to plaster the stage with reams of paper displaying the script further emphasizes its textuality, serving as a generalized critique of logocentrism. Nichol achieves a similar effect in his poetic practice when he connects confessional disclosure to the deconstruction of language: in The Martyrology, ‘truths’ are revealed not by working through language to an a priori reality, but by dwelling within language itself. For both writers, the resistance against the putative transparency of language functions as a challenge to its misguided instrumentalization.

Rather than regard writing as ancillary to the discovery of the essential self, Chaurette and

Nichol locate the self within the text, by which it simultaneously produces and is produced. They thus demonstrate the applicability of Derrida’s famous pronouncement, “il n’y a rien hors du texte” (1967a: 227),340 to the process of identity-formation. If the subject is “inseparable from the discursive structures and systems of signification” (Culler, 1982: 157) rather than prior to them, the act of confession must be seen to constitute the very subject it purports to describe.

340 “There is nothing outside of the text” (Derrida, 1998: 158).

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Beyond the Foucauldian Confession

Foucault’s critique of confessional discourse is motivated by precisely this insight regarding its constitutive role in the formation of subjectivity. His argument is predicated on the view that the terms in which one defines oneself will inevitably recapitulate and thus entrench the normative discourse of one’s social milieu. That the subject articulate himself is, as he sees it, a cultural imperative: Foucault states that “one of the main moral obligations for any subject is to know oneself, to tell the truth about oneself and to constitute oneself as an object of knowledge both for other people and for oneself” (Foucault, 2007: 151). It is significant that he regards self- interrogation as a moral precept: whereas the ancient world practised self-examination for the sake of private edification, Foucault regards the modern iteration as the preparation for a disclosure. In his view, the passage to self-articulation is fraught with the repressive modality of disciplinary power: thus, in Surveiller et punir, his discussion of the physical prison is underwritten by his observation regarding the disciplinary structure of society more generally, in which the power of the norm acts in much the same way as Bentham’s famous panopticon (1995:

186). Whereas for Anderson, intertextuality and textuality are the primary factors that prevent unmediated access to the pure subject, Foucault emphasizes the power dynamics that shape the kinds of avowals that this subject feels compelled to make: for him, a confession free of coercive dynamics is, at least in modern Western society, impossible.

While Foucault’s assessment is certainly applicable both to the voyeuristic trend in our contemporary culture as well as to the texts discussed in the previous chapters, many of which thematize a resistance to the scopophilic gaze, it is important to point out the limitations of his critique. Foucault’s argument rests on the assumption that all confessions are geared toward the production of knowledge. Our society, he maintains, has replaced ars erotica, the conception of sexuality as an art, with scientia sexualis, the science of sexuality (1976: 77-78). Entailed in this

250 shift is a movement from free expression to a rule-governed practice that can be evaluated according to pre-defined criteria. Although sexuality is a primary site of confessional importance, “[l]’aveu a diffusé loin ses effets” (1976: 79)341 such that multiple sites of experience can be characterized by the privileging of the production of knowledge: Foucault lists institutions such as justice, medicine, and education, alongside informal interactions among family, friends and lovers (1976: 79). Throughout this project, I have argued that it is possible to endorse certain aspects of Foucault’s diagnosis while simultaneously disagreeing with his conclusions. In order to do so, I have built on the insights of critics like Chloë Taylor (2009), who accepts Foucault’s argument regarding the cultural pervasiveness of confessional discourse but rejects his narrow view of confession as a practice inherently geared toward the revelation of truth. Such a restrictive definition ignores the way in which “false confessions become true of the subject in a performative or experiential sense” (2009: 82). Beyond pure fabrications, Taylor invokes several instances where the “masochistic pleasure in confessing” trumps its “truth-telling function” (2009: 85); this is the case, she argues, in Rousseau’s account of the theft of the ribbon342 as well as in Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man’s self-indulgent ranting. To these examples, it is possible to add a text such as Nabokov’s Lolita or McEwan’s Atonement, both of which are strategically predicated on deliberate falsifications. Humbert Humbert’s “tangle of thorns” (Nabokov, [1955] 1997: 9) is ostensibly self-reproaching but effectively self-exonerating insofar as its narrator attempts to humanize himself for the reader. Likewise, the narrator of

McEwan’s novel, Bryony, admits at the novel’s end that her confession has been deliberately falsified to rewrite a love story she is guilty of having sabotaged, in order to mitigate her guilt

341 “confession has spread its effects far and wide” ([1978] 1990: 59). 342 As has been previously discussed, this passage is explored at length by Paul de Man (1979), whose thesis Taylor is borrowing in the service of her own argument.

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(McEwan, 2003: 350). Foucault’s commitment to the alliance between power and knowledge causes him to overlook additional motivators other than the desire to tell the truth about the self.

As one critic rightly affirms, the confessional text must be regarded as having a dual polarity, “an oppositional, if not contradictory, task: to make available private intimacies for public consumption while, at the same time, to shield the confessing self from being consumed, harmed, or socially obliterated” (Krondorfer, 2010 : 15). Krondorfer’s conclusion is that the written confession can never achieve the same degree of “self-effacing truthfulness” as its auricular counterpart (2010: 15) because it is always mindful of its public status.

The image of the “shield” is a useful description for the resistance to hegemonic social pressures that we have seen in the preceding analyses. Whereas Krondorfer characterizes self- fictionalization as an almost instinctual form of self-protection, however, Nick Mansfield draws our attention to the ways in which deliberate acts of self-fashioning can function as pointed forms of rebellion against normative discourses. Like Taylor, Mansfield makes use of Foucault’s insight as a starting-point for his own thinking about the power of individuals to resist capitulating to regulatory norms. He contends that “[i]f power/knowledge works at the level of the subject, then it is at the level of the subject that it will most effectively be resisted” (2000:

63). In the absence of an “authentic or natural self that we can simply recover or struggle to liberate,” he asserts, “subjects should be geared toward a dynamic self-creation” (2000: 63). He thus proposes that we “construct a fictional or hypothetical selfhood outside of, or in pure hostility to, the conventions modern life seeks to normalise” (2000: 63). Although Mansfield does not directly address the role of confessional discourse in undertaking this project of

“dynamic self-creation,” the texts examined in the previous chapters prove exemplary in this regard. Chapter 2 opened in the underground, the liminal space that encodes both the site of social repression as well as the possibility of revolutionary activity. It is from this ambiguous

252 space that Offred begins claiming a voice, defining herself in opposition to the repressive regime that endeavours to proscribe her identity: “My self is a thing I must now compose,” she affirms.

“[...] What I must present is a made thing, not something born” (80). While Offred uses self- fictionalization in order to pass as an obedient subject, the self she presents to the reader is no less fabricated: at several intervals, she admits to having invented aspects of her story for our benefit. The definitive explosion of the illusion of narrative univocity occurs at the novel’s end, when we realize that the text has been assembled for us from fragmentary audiotapes. Atwood positions this extreme focus on narrative construction as a counterpoint to the essentialism that reduces Giladean women to mere vessels for the reproduction of the species. And whereas confession functions in Gilead as yet another state-sanctioned form of domination, Offred’s creative self-articulation speaks to the emancipatory power of confession when used in the service of “dynamic self-creation.”

By contrast, Tremblay depicts the inability of Manon and Sandra to define themselves outside of the parameters of their repressive environment as the basis of their entrapment. These two characters are, like Offred, confined to the margins of society, a position that is literalized in

Tremblay’s stage directions, which isolate the women on stage. On the surface, they are opposites of one another: Manon, the religious zealot, espouses the very conservatism and repression that Sandra, the outlandish transvestite, decries in her hypersexualised excoriation of social convention. Nevertheless, it becomes clear by the play’s end that both women feel a shared spiritual and existential void, which motivates their metatextual plea to be returned to the crucible of the playwright’s imagination. While it is to an extent true that Sandra’s laborious attempts to eliminate any trace of “l’homme que j’ai été” (53) involves a kind of self-invention, her extreme sexuality merely inverts the language of religion rather than escaping it. She self- identifies as a profane Virgin Mary (55) and dreams of writing a kind of “Bible” (46) on the

253 body of her lover, the aptly named Christian. In Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra, the characters’ inability to define themselves outside of the terms prescribed by their cultural context denounces the legacy of the Catholic Church in Québec. At the same time, however, the use of joual and the articulation of infelicitous confessions gesture towards a potentially optimistic renegotiation of identity in the wake of the Révolution tranquille.

In Chapter 3, we moved from charting the space of the underground to exploring the path of transcendence. This movement was accompanied by a shift in critical orientation: whereas the writers of the previous chapter used confession as a means of speaking out overtly against religious repression, those in the subsequent chapter creatively embraced a religious vocabulary in order to define themselves, albeit idiosyncratically, within an existing moral order. Elizabeth

Smart’s narrator’s strategic self-positioning as the simultaneous champion of beauty and victim of cruel fate shields her from censure: what others might term an adulterous love affair takes on the mythological proportions of an incontrovertible destiny. Rather than rejecting the existing moral hierarchy outright, she elevates herself to its summit by aligning herself with the supreme virtues of beauty and truth. While the distinction between fiction and autobiography has been central to my analysis, it is nevertheless clear that the politics of representation have very real implications for Smart herself, given the similarity of her novel to her life. By Grand Central

Station is not, however, a veiled autobiography, but a “poetic rendering of [Smart’s] inner life”

(McGill, 2007: 68) that strives toward the fulfillment of Mansfield’s injunction to “construct a fictional or hypothetical selfhood outside of, or in pure hostility to, the conventions modern life seeks to normalise” (2000: 63). Both Smart and her narrator are engaged in this process: the author creates a quasi-fictional avatar who uses her confession to enclose herself in a protective web, thereby insulating both creator and creature from normative social discourses. Foucault’s understanding of confession does not account for the kind of shielding of the self that is on

254 display here; this is attributable, on the one hand, to the fact that Smart’s confession is geared toward the articulation of feeling rather than the production of knowledge, and on the other, to its overt attempt to seduce the reader into accepting its terms.

The confessional discourse of The Martyrology is likewise oriented more toward the exploration of different modes of subjectivity than toward the revelation of constative truth. Like

Smart, Nichol makes use of his own biography, but does so in such a way that its particular details prove secondary to the language play for which they serve as the basis. In his case, the

“dynamic self-creation” (Mansfield, 2000: 63) Mansfield advocates has two poles. On the one hand, Nichol displays the strongly anti-mimetic impulse to “rip off the mask of words to free the sounds” (1); the result of following this instinct is, he informs us in Book 3, that “‘i’ dies.”343 At the same time, however, the poet confesses a strongly mimetic desire: “i wanted an image or a metaphor,” he admits; “something to contain me” (3). While The Martyrology can in some ways be considered a search for the language to “describe the thing accurately/ as it did happen [...] to me” (1) its perpetual redescriptions and rewritings confirm the impossibility of ever fixing the subject in one final vocabulary.

This same recognition of the need to find an appropriate set of images to “contain” the subject characterizes Isaac’s psychological journey in Les images. Keenly aware of the very problem identified by Foucault, namely the power dynamics inherent in the act of articulating the self, Isaac attempts to create an identity by appropriating cultural tropes and ‘repeating them with variation’ (Butler, 1999: 185). This is as true of her idiosyncratic inhabitation of Biblical intertexts (Isaac; Jephte’s daughter) as it is of her multiple redefinitions of the signifier

‘madness’. Following Butler, it is possible to locate Isaac’s quest for agency in her creative

343 The ultimate expression of this subordination of the ego to the latent power of the phoneme is, without a doubt, the experiments in sound he undertook as a member of the Four Horsemen.

255 negotiation of the narratives that surround her. Like Gérard de Nerval, who simultaneously embraced and denied his madness, Isaac’s self-creation involves the dialectical movement between, and redescription of, the subject positions available to women. Her tactic is diametrically opposed to that of Elizabeth Smart: whereas the latter attempts to seduce the reader by inviting her to identify with the protagonist, Isaac blocks any identification by refusing, first, to fix herself within a given signifier, and second, to appeal to the reader’s received understanding of linguistic or narrative convention. If Smart traffics in beauty, Isaac’s currency is the ugliness, the ‘howling thing’ that lurks at the heart of even the most seemingly well- groomed subject.

The multiplicity, indeterminacy, and metatextuality of Chaurette’s writing function as correctives of the normative tendency that reduces subjects to intelligible positions within the social order. The most overt manifestation of his critique is the slaying of a young child, which becomes a symbol of a generalized program of ‘immolating beauty’, i.e., of dismantling the established moral hierarchy. Like Bouchard, Chaurette places ugliness at the centre of his stage and compels the viewer to encounter it over and over. If murder is by definition a singular, criminal, act, however, the retelling of this killing evacuates it of pragmatic and moral intelligibility. Rather than offering us a standard admission of his crime, Charles Charles 38 instead shifts the terms of engagement such that his confession becomes not about the revelation, but rather the rejection, of a univocal truth. The fact that Charles Charles 19 is shielded from blame by his avowal of madness while two innocent men are wrongfully convicted and executed emblematizes the limits of the judicial process to produce a constatively true account of events.

Another form of ‘shielding’ occurs in the variety of subject positions occupied by the multiple

Charles Charles, whose plural incarnations prevent the reader/viewer from situating herself in

256 any given time or space within the narrative. If Foucault’s confession is geared at the production of knowledge, Chaurette’s is aimed at foreclosing it.

The aim of this project has been to demonstrate how confession, a practice that Foucault considers fundamental to the maintenance of the status quo, can work to subvert hegemonic discourses including patriarchy, religious and moral conservatism, and rationalism. In the six texts previously considered, the parodic deployment of the speech act of confession performs, at a formal level, the critique of the dominant discourse that the text thematizes. While their authors employ a variety of strategies, the common result of their efforts is a challenge to the possibility of ever providing a definitive account of the subject. Whereas for Foucault, this insight is allied to hegemony and reductive discourses, these writers present a more optimistic understanding of the power latent in the act of self-description. By drawing attention to mediation itself—whether by highlighting the intertext, questioning the referentiality of language, inhabiting an ever- changing multiplicity of avatars, or engaging in other forms of metatextual commentary—they demonstrate that confession can actually constitute a creative form of self-expression. It is in confronting the ‘impossibility’ of confession that they begin to articulate meaningful critiques and to imagine alternative ways of engaging in the world.

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