Readopolis

by Bertrand Laverdure

  Shopping mall = driving a car

  Convenience store = walking

  In accordance with market logic, deps reproduced the sales systems of shopping malls, but on a smaller scale. The owners of these new SMEs had understood that they needed to offer their walking customers the best-selling foodstuffs, the canned goods that were in fashion, and everything that would please the kids, most of whom were initiated into their first monetary exchanges in these small shopping schools. In supermarkets, it was necessary to create bagging stations and offer home delivery. In convenience stores, people only bought a few products at a time, so baggers lost their usefulness, yet owners quickly gave in to the temptation to imitate the delivery service of supermarkets.

  Most supermarkets were first established in these small commercial villages set up along highways. The concept of the supermarket permanently united retail trade and food distribution. An oil- and car-driven world, a disposable world. A world in which a packaged chicken has an expiration date, as does a shirt at Zellers (since fashion follows the cycle of the seasons).

  Everything for sale is perishable because the absolute is not commercial.

  In some cases, we find comfort in the perishable because it resembles the absolute. We’ll always find cans of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup on the shelves; in most Zellers, Glad garbage bags, Vim cleaning products, J Cloths, Ajax and bath towels, Drano, La Parisienne bleach, and Spic and Span. The world of home cleaning and food storage rightly fights, by any means possible, against the endless onslaught of decline, clutter, and dust. A benevolent coating to appease our commonplace interiors, our accustomed stomachs, and our fantasy of imperishable food. I protect my life against stains and refuse. I fight for a clean conscience. I am North American to the core.

  Refuse is the beginning of death; the eternal preservation of food, one of our Edenic dreams.

  * * *

  More pathetic messages from Maldonne.

  She is fond of me. Sad euphemism. Three messages in my voicemail. I thought I would be seeing Love on the Run for the third time, but instead the revenants of Hour of the Wolf are hounding me.

  I am living in a Bergman film.

  Madness is a banal theme in literature. Like every good reader, I have fed on its mysteries and crises more than once. In fact, when the character of the painter’s wife, played by Liv Ullmann in Hour of the Wolf, asks her husband if, in accordance with the curious logic of sharing that governs a couple’s life, his painting delirium will haunt her one day, will grow on her like the roots of a weed, her naïveté is not meant to be laughable. This simple woman, who has fallen in love with a great artist, nevertheless asks herself a good question: Doesn’t a couple actually resemble a machine of mutual cloning in a way? Imperceptibly, the gaps close up and scar, the mindsets merge.

  We continuously secrete words that annihilate anything outside the confines of the union between two people. On the surface, it all happens through the regime of words, but inside this flow of words, the flow of hormones feeds on the reactive energy aroused in the encounter between two individuals. The mandate of these two cells is to merge into one. In short, everything should be transmitted, everything keeps reacting and adapting forever.

  Madness, therefore, is transmissible. But up to what point?

  Maldonne became infatuated with me after one night of dissipation. Ordinary evening, usual urban scenario. Drinks in some bar, an invite to a party at Pascal’s, the earnest end-of-the-night search for the nearest 24-hour resto, an Italian poutine, and my arm over her shoulder, the hesitations before saying our goodbyes, my body automatically pressing against hers, then some random phrase, always meaningless, slipping through her lips.

  I woke up the next morning: splitting headache, stiff all over, the usual feelings of regret flitting through my mind, and a faint sense of well-being enveloping me. Trying to recover.

  maldonne: You okay? Not dreaming too much?

  ghislain (laboriously): What do you prescribe, if I can’t go on?

  maldonne (getting closer, kissing him): You know what I would like right now…

  A bit of vaudeville perfectly suits the morning games of lovers. Sexuality is the stage for a wide variety of gibes, which, according to the models imagined by the screenwriters of the sixties, live on in daily life in simplified forms.

  With Maldonne, I don’t remember feeling anything other than an unbearable desire to perform. We dramatized everything. From mornings to nights out, from lovemaking to our social life. A few months of this medicine were enough to thoroughly irritate me, not because this improvised tension annoyed me; on the contrary, rather she was seriously starting to wear me down. Her passion continued to grow, was even roused by my hesitation, my doubts, while I gradually lost all my resources, all my motivation.

  I became sullen, and she refused to see it.

  She knocked on my door at all hours. She inundated me with emails, pulverized all records of the number of telephone calls.

  Surreptitiously, I was forced to reduce our interactions to recreational sex.

  The ridiculousness of my convictions at the time saddens me all the more because I was sure that our pact would draw on unsuspected resources in the other. I was so naive.

  She rebelled, knew how to circumvent my defences. She wore me down.

  The sirens sang. I stuffed my ears with earplugs. Calm returned. Every time I would pull out the orange cones from my ear canals, the sirens would redouble their ardour, devising new odes in the dead of night.

  * * *

  Reading is a civic act.

  True autodidacts are privileged citizens.

  I make no claim to being one of them. I am a reader of novels and essays, poetry and news articles.

  My abilities as a reader do not go beyond that. However, I know determined readers, avid autodidacts who only really need one book, one instruction manual to grasp everything, absorb everything, set everything in motion. First and foremost, autodidacts are intelligent people. They constitute a category of readers for whom books are doors onto the world, telltale signs.

  My books do not hold all the answers. For me, they’re the source of anarchic individuality, of intellectual musings on the world.

  Fans of how-to books do not come from the same family of readers. We don’t speak the same language. Our libraries are nothing alike. We don’t visit the same historic sites. They will prefer the labs of inventors, residencies of politicians, sites of decisive battles, whereas I will choose the houses of writers, their living rooms and bedrooms.

  Readers of results, readers of impressions. People always stand on one side or the other of a divide.

  The first category includes all readers of history and practical how-to books. They appreciate details, technical accuracy, applied theories. For them, reading is a civic act because it helps them assimilate more and more information about their environment. They are encyclopaedists without knowing it.

  Readers of impressions are part of another tribe—one of emotionalists and philosophers. For them, the world is a magical, wide-open book, a never-ending fairy tale, a universe of eclectic and complex individuals. For this type of reader, devouring a novel or carefully reading a collection of poetry becomes a civic act.

  Here is what, for me, makes a book: an individual’s artistic ability to grasp all the nuances of their affiliation with the real world—the physical world, the mental world—and their power to transcend theses nuances.

  Since its connection to reality is more immediate, the tribe of practicalists tends to regard the reading program of the impressionists as a trivial pastime. I am aware of this, but don’t take it seriously.

  In the concept of the world that is particular to practicalists, a will to act in reality serves as a modus vivendi. If you do not think in this way, you’re ranked below those who watch soaps on TV.

  Whereas for the
impressionists, reading is an end in itself, a civilizing act, a philosophical-aesthetic experience that is satisfying on its own, fully complete as such. To add the finishing touches to the picture, we would need to speak of experiential patience and truth.

  The reader of novels seeks a means to delve into the world, to grasp all the subtle connections between individuals, to gather fine and sometimes exceedingly allusive impressions about the movements of beings. The reader of novels and poetry is also interested in the workings of the vocal apparatus and the creative achievements of language. Ethically inclined, this reader does not overlook the animals and plants responding in their anthropomorphic idioms, which the reader enjoys translating. The practical reader calls this childishness, but the impressionistic reader retorts that to imagine the existence of a Dr. Dolittle and sympathize absurdly with the suffering of animals, thanks to a character born of the imagination, offers a kind of comic relief and lessens the angst of not being able to fully communicate with their quadruped or hexapod friends. The impressionistic reader knows full well that we nurture the imagination through imagination.

  As everyone can probably guess, I belong to the category of impressionistic readers, and I am no worse off for it.

  My friend Pascal, on the other hand, belongs to the category of practical readers, autodidacts that take a somewhat cynical view towards those in my category. I never get out of it easily. I’ve never been at ease with placid friends.

  * * *

  I eat poorly, then hurry to the movies to watch fluff, serenades, and shams. The passivity and stupor of the spectator suits me just fine. In general, because I read such dreary manuscripts about all the problems of living in society, I have developed a therapeutic response to this intellectual chore, namely watching mainstream cinema, achieving catharsis through pure entertainment.

  Reading is work. Too many intelligent and sophisticated books exist. I feel a deep shame if I comply with the marketing and buzz of the moment. I don’t have this devotion for the cinema. The book is another matter.

  I don’t dare entertain myself by reading. It’s not out of snobbery; only a show of respect towards an activity that teaches us to live fully and to think. I belong to the cult of the devotees of the book.

  However, I’m not a creepy type. What I’m talking about is more like the game “Simon Says,” in which one of the players, in this case me, refuses to follow the rules, yet keeps observing the game. I withdraw from the world. I accept my role as observer, an inactive pedestrian in a constant state of meditation before what he sees, what he reads. This is not quite a spiritual phase, the last step towards philosophical and personal wisdom, as Kierkegaard saw it. Nor does it fall within an aesthetic phase, if we follow the same track. Rather, it’s something between the two.

  I would call this state the reading phase.

  The reading phase propels us into the world of readopolis. And the readopolis produces a complex state of concentration that enables us, by decoding a series of written or printed letters, to reproduce at will the sense of being detached from the world, the impression of doing precision work on a fragile object placed before us. The sentence that you are currently reading, the words that you are more or less quickly deciphering, your eyes that have already scanned this progression of commas are therefore functioning in readopolis mode.

  Incidentally, reading is my work and, as with any profession, we come to indentify with a model that the stereotypes connected to our position convey. For me, reading has become a kind of ritual of existence. I am obsessed with practising this art form—as it is one.

  I got READOPOLIS printed in orange Cooper Black font on a dark green, cotton T-shirt. I had a worshipping fit, and I’m not sorry about it. A fetishist and pathetic occupation; I accept it.

  The book is an auspicious gateway to the multitude, to diversity, to the most disparate forms of knowledge and sensibilities. I’ve always been certain of this. By reading for publishers, writing reader’s reports, notes, comments, critical remarks in the margins of manuscripts, I penetrated this truth. I lived it day in and day out at the time. I had attained the reading phase. I accessed the readopolis mode at will.

  My ascension to the reading phase had increased my critical faculties tenfold. I bore the onus of acceptance or rejection increasingly well.

  I was surrounded by nonprofessional readers, my friends, often more cultured than me, but I had become a reader who, for his part, could lay claim to his professionalism.

  In other words, I now read to earn money.

  It was real work, therefore, this sacrifice that brings us, like any sacrifice, to the screen behind which humanity no longer sees us.

  * * *

  Maldonne was a fan, a total fanatic, of Hubert Aquin. She had managed to ferret out a signed copy of Prochain épisode* in a used bookstore on Laurier Avenue. She didn’t flinch when the bookseller asked $100 for it. Like every dedicated junkie of bookshops and booksellers, she knew that signed Hubert Aquins were hard to find. He was a drinker, a car racing and sex fanatic, but, it seems, parsimonious with his signature.

  Supply and demand in the world of sellers of signed books was an inexact science, a mysterious gothic tale.

  No statistics or directories of signed books existed that could have interested the hordes of aficionados. No register could guarantee us that we were not dealing with a fake, that the author didn’t sign books compulsively, or that the rarity of the book or signature of a particular writer was well and truly real.

  The world of used bookstores and dealers of rare and out-of-print books worked in impenetrable, ghostly, mysterious ways. You first needed to join this brotherhood of yellowed paper.

  Maldonne and I were members of this club. Our expression of faith had been duly noted in multiple FileMaker, Access, and other management software files of these high priests of books.

  François Côté and Abe knew us. The pallid coots of the Chercheur de trésors bookstore knew us, and the others—bearded, catted, bespectacled or lacking personal hygiene and greasy-haired—had noticed us. Some knew our names, if not our tastes.

  We were part of a family. We too were treasure seekers.

  * * *

  Of my friends, Courrège is by far the most polite and at the same time, the most demonstrative. She works at the Grande Bibliothèque.

  She can often be found on the second floor (although the employees of the main library are caught in a human cycle of perpetual relocation so as to never get bored at work). This floor is dedicated to literature. On neatly arranged shelves, Quebec literature has been distributed among other national literatures. In French translation, of course. No fear of a socioeconomic ghetto here; we have been placed into the world with no fuss. To see Marie-Claire Blais so close to Beckett gives us an intense feverish hope, but also reassures us of the legitimacy of our cultural expectations. We carried some weight; we had a place to fill. If there had been a cultural Olympics, we would have qualified.

  Is this just wishful thinking? Possibly. The fact remains that living in an urban area, you need to read. So the battle is already partly won.

  My friends and I were trying to increase the rate of quality reading. Courrège, who was named after a perfume and didn’t care—an androgynous beauty laughing at her own physical anonymity that hid and stripped her of sex appeal—had the ability, rare among readers, to see reality from its less disappointing angles. Courrège was an optimistic reader. A rare case. Her engagement and enthusiasm nourished me. For me, she was a messenger of intelligence, a diligent of the stock of convictions that fluctuate with the times and the fatalistic commentaries of media-savvy intellectuals.

  I envied her high spirits, which never verged on exaltation.

  A nice character, she was also a fan of game shows. She dreamed of knowing everything and was fascinated by the propensity of television game shows to reward a participant who had the knowledge r
equired to answer two dozen questions over the course of one show.

  Culture could give us returns. Culture was worth its weight in gold. Culture deserved our attention.

  Culture also had its athletes.

  Tapping her index finger on the counter, she had frequently told us about these athletes, these outstanding memorizers that gratified the television networks. Courrège was one of these contestants. Not the best one of all, or the most dispassionate, but insightful enough to often qualify and be part of the 13% of people who know, people who respond, people who work their memory for the benefit of those who need it.

  I don’t know if Courrège really was more cultured than my other friends.

  Than Pascal, for example, who never seemed to be caught off guard in a conversation, who always quoted the right authors and was seldom wrong about the references one must list if one wishes to prove equal to an expert in a conversation.

  Maldonne knew everything there was to know about Hubert Aquin and a few other filmmakers and authors. To enter into her areas of interest meant admitting our ignorance and cursory knowledge.

  Courrège was more restless, eager to ask questions, to retain it all. She had the personality of the eternal student. Never completely confident in how much she knew, but also never second-rate or ridiculous, either. She recorded information, classified and compiled it, organized it according to systems of organic, logical steps. Her epistemological metabolism worked perfectly.

  Less keen on calling than on emailing, Courrège emailed me two or three times a week. She took advantage of our friendship to inflict the saga of her private life on me—her attempts at seduction and her successes.

  So yesterday, when I opened her nth email, I learned that she had participated in the pilot for a game show on Télé-Québec.