In an ecstatic vision, I saw myself brandishing a glass cutter in the right hand and the puny cage in the other. An unfortunate apparition, with which I distracted myself for a moment.
Distraction.
Then I quickly tucked the cutter back in my pocket and threw the cage off Pascal’s balcony with an insolent clang.
There I was, Ghislain the reader, nothing but a common thief.
I would call Pascal in a few hours to explain myself.
pascal: Ghislain! What are you doing here?
The noise made by the cage falling and crashing below the balcony had produced results. Pascal came out, scrutinized me from head to toe, annoyed but with a mocking air.
ghislain: Listen, I…
pascal: You wake me at this hour to tell me: Listen, I… Frankly, voicemail works too.
ghislain: I have to tell you something… the parrot...
pascal: The parrot is doing fine. I found a sheet and a cage, and it’s sleeping now. Tomorrow, I’ll take it to the spca.
ghislain: I need it to recruit readers.
pascal: What are you talking about?
ghislain: Laverdure the parrot is a sign; it didn’t come here by chance. I would like to take it for a few days so I can teach it a few things.
pascal: This again! It is not Laverdure the parrot. It’s the parrot of an eccentric who taught it a phrase spoken by a parrot in a novel.
ghislain: I’m not asking you to throw yourself into the fire. I’m simply asking you to let me conduct a small experiment.
pascal: This parrot isn’t yours. You’re being ridiculous.
ghislain: No, I’m not being ridiculous.
pascal: Yes, you’re being ridiculous.
ghislain: No, I’m not being ridiculous.
pascal: Yes, you’re being ridiculous.
ghislain: I want people to think they’re seeing an apparition in 3D. Imagine a parrot saying: “You must read Jean Basile. You must read Le Grand Khan,” flying all around the city. All of a sudden, people become curious, they wonder: Who is this Jean Basile? What is Le Grand Khan?
pascal: Everyone will think it’s one of Cossette’s new ads and give the bird a good kick.
ghislain: If it only works once, then it only works once. But at least I tried!
pascal: It’s ridiculous.
ghislain: No, it’s not ridiculous.
pascal: It’s ridiculous.
ghislain: No, it’s not ridiculous.
pascal: Ah, go to sleep!
* * *
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Ghislain, what got into you?
Pascal told me you wanted to steal the parrot and turn it into a marketing agent!
It’s pathetic but really cute!
I finished reading Le Grand Khan. You make me laugh because Basile is in fact a Russian immigrant… This has no bearing on his novel, which is unilaterally Montrealist and Quebecois, but it’s just that I realized that there is no literature de souche, no literature of Quebecois origin, that Simon Harel, who wrote a book on “identity poaching,” was right… that now we have to steal the part of ourselves that defines us. I don’t want to get into an abstruse discussion, but I read about twenty pages of Harel’s book. He writes: “In contrast to discourses that euphorically promote the success of dissident forms of cultural hybridity, poaching does not have any meaning in itself. From this perspective, poaching has the virtue of indicating strategies of deterritorialization that transform a place into a dynamic space. The true usefulness of poaching rests in actively promoting the dissolution of territorial control.”
A compelling metaphor… an illegal hunt that takes the form of identity brutality, where we take what we want without ever submitting to consensus.
Harel adds: “[Poaching] is a tactic with limited power. Sometimes, it is a cruel practice. In the discomfort that poaching produces… lies a muted violence we must learn to recognize.”
For me, Le Grand Khan is the story of a poacher, a cultural poacher, conceited and pretentious, egotistical and narcissistic. He kills hope and imposes his writer’s life as an identity weapon.
Basile describes some of this in Le Grand Khan: “Let us get on with it. Tonight, I want to rule because, for once, it is easy, not like a queen bee over a noisy empire teeming with wings, but over none other than myself, less imperious than Genghis Khan, my intrinsic hordes obeying my smallest command, not exactly proud of being that, but content in knowing how to be that, and drawing joy from this, on this infinitely profound and fresh night, having no one to meet but the unexpected, no more work, no more friends, free as the wind, breathing whatever odours I want, rejecting noises that wear me down, retaining only those that, tonight, delight my well-trained ear, eyes almost closed, falsely blind and walking on brightly lit streets, which henceforth belong to me.”
As for me, I would have taught your parrot a few book titles to promote. An adventurous parrot that relentlessly repeated the title of a new book everyday, but in a different part of the city, would be a formidable marketing agent. In any case, you know as well as I do that the number of books to promote vastly exceeds the number of reviewers… This is why I have given myself the task of dazzling you with my research skills. I’ve just finished reading Catéchèse* by Patrick Brisebois, a thin novel, a novella if you like, whose voice stands out from the rest of the books being published nowadays… a short lesbiano-ann-héberto-science-fictional novel… a hybrid work completely of its time. So many old-fashioned books die on the shelves of the Grande Bibliothèque that I can’t help but be glad that this author exists. I appreciated the overall quality, the perceptible progression towards science fiction (it capitalizes a bit on the concept of role play in SimCity), the gallery of nasty female characters, and the archaic village frozen in time… and I found the part about masturbating with a Virgin Mary figurine pretty funny…
Just between you and me, I agree with you, Laverdure the parrot came to us the other day of its own accord, to sanctify us and stress our quiet apostleship…
Take care!
Courrège
xx
* * *
* Catechism. (Trans.)
4.
Reveries of a Disoriented Rambler-Clerk
reading had given me an oasis of calm, had guided me like an abstract mentor into a comfortable desert. But recently, it had transformed into a method of persecution. Yet I didn’t ask for much—just to carry out my work, write my reports, receive my cheques. The story with the parrot cruelly crippled my routine. I could never have imagined the extent to which a bird would crush me.
I had understood that the life of a reader is that of an assaulted rambler.
Why all the effort to resurrect him if not to express the conjunction of aggression and my predisposed vulnerability; at least here, there is no danger, cities are angels for those who know how to nestle under their wings, I will build you a city out of rags, me, passionate about what I do and knowing it like a glove all the way to the fingertips, at my signal, the stone forests and human sea will rise, no longer flowing as it once did, roaring from window to window, eager chrysalis exploding the cocoon, but with calculated slowness, like the marching Royal Guard, step by step, barely grazing the ground, or taking me for Rousseau, collecting plants in the streets, a solitary rambler, finding all the names, the places, to each their duty and their privilege, like a secret route, calm, immobile, permanent, almost consoling.
Page 118 of Le Grand Khan, page 675 of my fantasy autobiography.
* * *
“The form of a city changes faster, alas, than the human heart.” This is not me, but Jacques Roubaud, as per the two Waldrops, his translators. It’s a title. In the style of Queneau or Réda, he gave us, in The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart, childlike sn
apshots, witticisms husked in an urban recycling bin.
This morning, I set out on the streets of Montreal in search of words abandoned on the road, sheets of paper, taking myself for Roubaud. It’s soothing to settle oneself in an imagined body and to manoeuvre this body with a driver’s confidence.
I strolled in Parc Saint-Émile. Its cracked sidewalks and decrepit benches gave me the impression that the park was turning into an artifact. I stopped for a few moments by the pétanque field, a gravel court enclosed in a narrow wooden frame at most fifteen centimetres high. The place was deserted, no pétanque players in sight. I went on my way.
On the other side of the street, a few bits of paper were stuck to the sidewalk. I crossed the street. The sun had not yet drained all the moisture from these dead fibres.
First, I found a lined sheet, folded into an awkward accordion by the foul weather. It was someone’s homework, part of an essay. A grade was written in the upper right corner, a few red marks on the page. It was an exam. The person who had written the essay had left an empty space between each line of writing to give the teacher room to indicate what didn’t work, what was wrong, what would have to be thrown out.
The teacher had not been severe. The essay still had some small errors and two or three inappropriate, badly chosen words left unmarked.
In my own way, I, too, was an anonymous, even hidden, teacher. Instead of covering the manuscripts I received with red scrawl, I held back, kept to the sidelines, left to others the thankless task of transmitting to my victims the essence of my reservations and rejections.
I was nameless, faceless. I was Ghislain the reader to my friends, if they felt like harmlessly teasing me, but otherwise, to all the others, I was Ghislain the anonymous.
I had the job of a hypocrite. I wouldn’t have been able to say if I was among the most competent ones in the field, but I carried out my task with all the professionalism that it demanded.
I wanted to choose good books. I wanted to control people, at my own pace, millimetre by millimetre, title by title, by injecting a dose of my tastes, which I believed to be sound, into the publishing program of a publishing house I admired. I had wanted to be part of a certain editorial continuity. So, at that point, I was feeling a bit disoriented.
I crumpled the essay and threw it, like a pétanque ball, to the other side of the street. It didn’t quite reach the pétanque field.
A bit farther off, near the corner of Rachel and Saint-Germain, I spotted another paper ball. Much more compact, the size of a large marble. Carefully, I started to smooth it out. It was a sheet torn out of a cash receipt book, Classic brand. In the lower left corner, a “thank you” was printed in cursive letters to compensate for the potential lack of etiquette of waiters or clerks.
I strolled around like an affectionate dilettante, a solitary dreamer, noticing the abundance of written materials.
Even though I loved with an epic passion the unaffected lucidity of Laurent-Michel Vacher, our most frank and determined Quebecois atheist materialist, I was first and foremost a literary man. That is to say, a pseudo theologian of writing.
Every reader is a disappointed Platonist, in search of time.
The literature that is most objective and least polite in its surprising rawness, its frankness, always accepts the world of ideas, the world of forms. It’s impossible to escape it. Every reader of fiction is either an awkward idealist or an oblivious idealist. We cannot escape it.
The human being is made of perishable material that, for a moment before dying, thinks. This transition that leads us to death, in whatever way we experience it, is filled with ideas we gather from books, just like me today gathering these unimportant scraps strewn across the street after the rain.
Already knowing he was condemned, Vacher wrote brilliantly about the difficult subject of death in his Carnet devant la mort.* Page after page, he states his atheist credo, at all times trying to escape the ghosts of literature, of philosophy—that coquette in a dressing gown—to flee the elegant turns of phrase that only result in affectation or a convenient confusion intended to factitiously increase the writing’s profound depth (a term that he actually ridicules, rejecting the nobleness we usually give it). He writes:
I belong to a living species, the Homo sapiens sapiens as the experts call it. From what they say, as I intimated at the beginning, there are over six billion of these speaking primates on the planet—a figure that, frankly, seems unimaginable. To somehow comprehend its concrete meaning, I try never to lose sight of the fact that every minute this translates into roughly 100 deaths (approximately 1.66 per second) and 260 births (4.33 per second)! I thus imagine a giant screen, like in an IMAX theatre, with six billion small flickering lights, with an entry zone in the upper left side and an exit in the lower right, where every second we could see the 4.33 sparks of newborn life appear and the 1.66 sparks die out and disappear.
I do not know if many of our brains would be able to endure such a spectacle. Instead, I bet that my fellow creatures and I would only morally survive if we forgot these figures, vertiginous and inhuman to us, of which an overly clear awareness would trivialize our usual sense of importance to such an extent that it would feel almost unbearable, not to mention the possible damage done to our encouraging ethical respect for all human life… (Stalin: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The deaths of millions is a statistic.”)
In any event, we can therefore say that in terms of abstract knowledge, we now know the lottery of life and death with a fairly high degree of objective precision, but we have not been adequately equipped (through natural evolution or divine will, it’s of little import here) to intuitively cope with it without having to pay a seemingly too high a price.
Pages 60 and 61 of Une petite fin du monde: Carnet devant la mort, page 710 of my imaginary confessions.
* * *
There.
I punch the large metal plate. The blue handicap button vibrates for a moment. The sliding door lets me pass.
I go into the Grande Bibliothèque, my sanctuary, my oasis.
I give a confidential nod to the Swahili warrior with authoritative braids guarding the entrance of the great Montreal Sphinx, then pass the magnetic arches, the green signs, and then, the still staircase. I head for the elevator. If one were to see a progression in the events that follow, that would be a mistake, because everything happens all at once; I forget all about Basile, Maldonne, and Pascal for sixty-eight seconds.
Suddenly, Patrick Poulin’s sweet voice resounds: “Congratulations! You have just won a set of systems!” (Morts de Low Bat, Le Quartanier, 2007.)
In the elevator, a man in his sixties takes me in his arms and whispers: “I am Laverdure the parrot.” It was him. A man in his sixties, going up to the fourth floor of the large book complex.
An ascent towards the moving image and orchestrated sounds.
He tells me: “Chatter, chatter.”
I chattered, and for good reason! I was a first-rate chatterbox.
Then he holds out his hand, the way you hold out your hand to a second-zone being, a bit contemptuous with extreme Royal Academy haughtiness.
Then he says: “That’s all you ever do, and how unfortunate for you.”
Waiting for my hands to reach my mouth, tell my eyes and then my brain that words are required.
Waiting, therefore, for articulated language to arise, I nervously stop in my tracks.
A film crew, directed by Louis Malle, has taken the opportunity to infiltrate the building, in order to handle my characteristic lack of reaction. What those in the field call the “Marceline effect.” They install a plank on wheels under my feet, fitted with a small, silent motor, remote-controlled to move an actor standing upright, impassive. I am like a stork on a scaffold. Everything stirs around me while I move with renewed confidence.
So I am rolling between the stacks on the second fl
oor at the pace imposed by the grips of the camera crew. Moving quickly, head still, the unusual set scrolling by. They film me from below, from the side, under the buttocks, a Trojan Horse on wheels.
Calmly, feeling a trace of faint love for the human race (though my perspective has changed somewhat since reading Vacher: “I do believe that I will leave this world convinced that Christians are mistaken: ‘to love your neighbour’ is at best an illusion, at worst a potentially destructive force. I’ll take the rule of law and justice a hundred times over.” Une petite fin du monde: Carnet devant la mort), I grab one of Gallimard’s “Quarto” books, Moi et mon double, a volume of selected writing by Gombrowicz.
Nothing is ever trivial in choosing a book.
Opening it, I notice an ex libris—an unexpected label in a book intended for the collective masses. After scanning the bookplate for a second and third time, I realize that it’s an artwork. I read:
A part of you on this book—Sep 29, 1998. The fingerprints found on the cover of this book were collected. These fingerprints were then carefully analyzed at the Centre des arts actuels Skol during the winter of 1999. The results of this research now belong to you. Some of the samples collected were presented in a display case in the hall of the Main Library, near the circulation desk. The rest of the work is being conserved as part of a controlled humidity and temperature reserve collection.
This is ex libris number 84.
On the left side of the bookplate, a justified text provides further information about the artist’s project: “Everywhere, on every book of this library, you leave your fingerprints over those of the previous readers. Together with the others, you form a skin on every work without realizing it.”
And written in small lettering on the lower left: “A project by Raphaëlle de Groot.”
Then, the book’s call number on the right: 891.8537 G 632 mo.
I forget about Courrège.
Readopolis Page 7