Back to the show.
A segment on the invited guests.
Camera two. Medium-long shot of Oprah. She presents the first guest. An elegant man in his late thirties. A doctor. It’s the typical portrait of an ideal single person. Responsible, charming, well-established—anyone with these qualities should not remain single. But it’s Mark Winberger’s choice.
A professional, quick montage of his daily life. We see him at work, in his doctor’s lab coat, then at home with his dog, walking in the afternoon, then sitting alone at the table before a delicious-looking dish, gracefully handling knife and fork.
Camera two. Oprah makes a teasing joke. She announces that, what’s more, he’s an outstanding cook! Who wouldn’t want him? She pouts, indicating all the attraction that a man of his calibre can generally arouse in women.
Camera three. Mark Winberger comes out from the wings. The floor manager indicates applause to the audience.
Satiara claps with gusto. Doesn’t feel the tingling sensation, doesn’t notice the redness of her palms. She’s experiencing something extraordinary. She’s experiencing an angelic interlude in her ordinary life. She doesn’t blame anyone. She doesn’t want to blame anybody. Men are what they are and she can’t change them. But in the meantime, she can still dream, buy Beyoncé albums, and hang Oprah Winfrey posters in her small apartment.
One day, she will be a journalist for the Chicago Tribune, but for now, she has to pay the rent, pay for her American Lit courses, find a husband. But she doesn’t want to find a husband right away. She understands people who make difficult choices or who can’t do anything and allow themselves to be led by chance encounters. And she wants Mark Winberger to see her, to share the fullness of his life with a woman who has nothing.
She knows that Oprah would understand her, that Dr. Phil would find a way to cut through the passive mentality that rules her. She knows it, expects it, and that’s enough. At Harpo Studios, she’s no longer a statistic; she’s submerged in the desires of everyone. She becomes a present young woman. A young woman with dreams like everyone else.
Camera one. Mark Winberger explains that it’s important to learn to live alone, whatever the cost. He seems to be preaching an extinct religion, a strange parable. With clear eloquence and simple phrases, he extols to the audience the importance of solitude, the importance of getting used to our solitary existence. In this respect, he points out that we dedicate at least half our lives to solitude, to moments of reflection, rest, solitary work, reading, watching, travel, silence, concentration, daydreams. Furthermore, others teach us how to accept our solitude better. They enable us to feel empathy, so as to better understand their own solitude. Community exists to help people accept their solitary fate. Helping another means giving them the means to better grasp their own singularity, their aloneness. Mark Winberger is not sad, he feels he’s being logical. Camera two. Oprah looks at her guest, rolling her eyes. She tells him: “You have the temperament of a hermit!” We hear the audience laugh. Transition, montage.
Camera three. The floor manager asks for a warm applause to reward the guest’s well-spoken remarks. Camera two. Oprah wonders whether happy, single people are not people who have been hurt in relationships, or embittered by mourning a lover.
The second part of the interview with Mark Winberger after the break.
Commercial break.
Satiara knows that we’ll all end up like desiccated dogs, dead for days under the shrubs of the savannah. There’s no point in blaming life for anything. Liberated, affluent, humiliated, rich or poor, everyone will end up under some shrub, eyes eaten by vultures, ribs licked by the wind, teeth exposed to the sun, stripped of their rosy hue.
When she sees a client, she sees a desiccated dog. In the moment, she even feels pity, clumsily tries to protect the men she meets from their pathological solitude. Sometimes, she kisses them, if she feels like it. Receives the other’s distress like a shameful gift.
Back to the show.
8.
Prosopopoeia
ghislain didn’t know what to think about Courrège now. He had the impression that he wanted her. However, Maldonne was the one on his mind. But it came down to the same thing.
He had no choice. He had nothing to reproach himself for. No one was asking him to take additional risks.
In his downtime, he couldn’t help it, he thought of trivial things. He asked himself questions, analyzed his doubts by questioning his certainties.
In this manner, he examined his constitution as a reader, and considered himself the head of the department of lost paper.
He’d just seen a Norwegian film, Reprise by Joachim Trier. It tells the story of two budding writers and their relationship to success. One goes crazy, the other receives great acclaim for a difficult book called Prosopopoeia. Through a kind of mise en abîme, this formalist work reflects the film itself, conceived with a formal aesthetic reminiscent of the Honk Kong New Wave (choreographed action, stylized characters, sophisticated storyline, game of mirrors and echoes). A literary film delivering a story about brotherly friendship that turns to drama. Every community is built on tragedy, all fraternity conceals coarse jealousies. Friendship is a mental construct, an ideal. One sole person rejects this ideal, and the community dissolves, goes into crisis, breaks down. Those who can adapt the fastest will be the ones who will endure. Friendship is a house of cards abandoned to the winds. We all survive by changing, transforming, and losing friends.
Ghislain imagined a Quebecois literary success more phenomenal than Harry Potter. He could see those in the literary crowd—reticent, timid—devoting themselves to the sport of interviews, proliferating amusing comments, appearing at the international launch of the Quebecois book’s English translation. Global media would invade Quebec’s winter, straight-laced celebrities would wander around the city, Oprah Winfrey herself would come to record a special show in honour of Prosopopoeia’s author, live from the Lion d’Or one snowy night.*
Prosopopoeia, whose title refers to a rhetorical device, would remind people that literature is ultimately only the vitalization of ideas in the form of hyperrealist stories or tales.
All things considered, Ghislain entertained a somewhat hackneyed fantasy. But he delighted in how all of Quebec got a kick out of Céline Dion, who sanctioned any megalomaniacal behaviour, even the most idiotic. Besides, he believed that in a hundred years, Quebec’s entire cultural and literary life of our time would be overshadowed by the rule of Céline Dion. In a hundred years, people would say “that was in Céline Dion’s time.” And they would have said all that there was to say about the cultural life of our era.
He couldn’t help swallowing a smile of dazed satisfaction, a burgeoning laugh. His own era amused him, and this consoled him about everything. Even about his own futility as an ordinary reader.
That’s when that he started thinking about Courrège.
He was looking for a banal loophole for his fleeting satisfaction.
He frittered away the rest of the day at the Grande Bibliothèque. He wanted to relax, get back to the books, camp in the ultimate readopolis.
Essentially, he wanted to assure himself that he was contributing to the world of print. And, by extension, to the world in general.
* * *
Maldonne was looking at the street while waiting for the bus.
Fade in–fade out. Interior shots of a Norwegian government helicopter. Dr. Larsen, the helmsman, the helicopter pilot, and Nicolas are onboard the small aircraft, flying just above the mountain peaks of the Magdalena Fjord.
Hamlet’s Twin. Maldonne was brooding over the scene of Sylvie’s disappearance. Her distressed lover, Nicolas Vanesse, goes to search for her.
Searching was an expiatory experience.
Searching buried philosophical contractions in a distant fjord, a strange country with the topography of an open book, karstic wounds,
mythological valleys.
Curiously, Hubert Aquin was sometimes seen as a philosophical writer. This didn’t fit his persona of a postmodern pioneer. Nevertheless, the scene where the character of Nicolas Vanesse goes in search of Sylvie, his “daughter of fire,” in the forgotten corners of the Svalbard archipelago always plunged her into an embarrassing post-romantic reverie.
Her romantic liver throbbed in her concentrated body. She was digesting the strange toxins of Aquin’s post-romantic images with unusual compunction.
Waiting for the bus was an expiatory experience. Surveying the city with strangers and a driver too at ease to be polite annoyed her. She thought again of Micheline Lanctôt’s film, Sonatine, of Pascale Bussières and Marcia Pilote fishing for amity from bus drivers and people on the subway. Maldonne feared the reassuring solitude of public transportation, the sliding doors and terrible, gravedigger ticket clerks, their notorious impatience (which secretly meant go, quickly, get swallowed up, go, there are others besides you to bury today).
But what was feeding her melancholy? What was its basis?
Not Ghislain, anyway?
No.
Ah, maybe yes.
Actually, she hadn’t the faintest idea.
The bus showed up at the time indicated in the timetable.
No one noticed anymore that this was a small miracle. No one noticed anymore the dozens of urban miracles that are the foundation of contemporary life. No one noticed anymore the young preoccupied women in glass bus shelters, gently bobbing their heads, isolated by music.
No one would have the patience to sympathize with everyone’s problems, everyone’s doubts, everyone’s stories, everyone’s melancholic whims, everyone’s unsaid words. No one can really attest to it, but everyone knows that we all have three secret thoughts for every one thought revealed. Who notices the size of the iceberg beneath the civil level of conversation?
When a telepathic Google comes into existence, half the planet will cry out of spite the first time they access others’ thoughts and problems. People will hold back from thinking too much. No doubt, a few years later, thoughts will start being taxed.
* * *
Arriving at the Grande Bibliothèque, Ghislain ran right into Courrège, who was working at the information counter on the second floor. They each noticed surprise in the other’s gestures. They began a conversation in Morse code, intercut by short and long breaths. A tacit handbook regulated the type of conversations allowed at work. Thirty years of talk shows, soap operas, intellectual comedies, TV series, sitcoms, shocking interviews, MTV, online chats, blogs, and YouTube had constructed modes of interpersonal interaction. You had to be self-depreciating, never take yourself seriously, never swagger, never doubt the validity of urban life.
Ghislain was neither funny (at least not intentionally) nor threatening, so he had no choice. He had to keep it brief. Not drag on too long. In one of Molière’s or Racine’s plays, a character like Ghislain would have played the minor role of a maidservant or a confidante. The plays had receptacles for confidences and dischargers of confidences. Despite his propensity to philosophize, Ghislain did not possess the verve of protagonists, new TV stars, instant celebrities. He accepted this.
Raphaëlle de Groot had not been satisfied with leaving her bookplate only in Gombrowicz’s book. She had left her trace in a multitude of books.
When I saw Ghislain. When he extricated me from a long moment of inattention, I divulged my discovery; I told him about the latest result of my de Grootian excavations.
The artist had stuck a bookplate in one of Saul Bellow’s books, the translation of More Die of Heartbreak, whose approximate French title was Le cœur à bout de souffle.
This was ex libris number 105. The book’s call number was 813.54 B448co. The date “October 3, 1998” was stamped on the book. A text, always the same, in typewriter type, framed the unusual bookplate on the left side: “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.”
A skin of sorrow, without a doubt.
* * *
* A crowd around the book table.
Oprah begins singing in English. Behind her, a PowerPoint slide show simultaneously transmits the French translation of her words. She sings in tune, handles the mic with confidence, puts on a show. Her brooding voice pierces through the general hubbub.
OPRAH’S SONG
(To the tune of Adamo’s “C’est Ma Vie”)
My story began with a few loving words
Mother reading me tales.
Often I gritted my teeth and dreamt of bliss.
I was a wise child.
Then came the day when I read my first book.
And was so transformed.
I then had the means to fill up with dreams,
My commonplace life.
Since then I’ve read thick novels,
Thrillers, short stories,
Works most profound.
Since then I’ve never confused
Beautiful dreams with night.
I’m happy just to laugh.
For some time
I wanted to impose
My ideal stories on the world.
But with the detectives of my senses close on my heels,
I chose to leave the ball.
REFRAIN
Prosopopoeia, prosopopoeia, I tell you my love of books, I live no better, I live no less than in your simple bliss.
Onstage, the notes fly over the murmur of the room. Oprah sways with remarkable vigour. Everyone is happy.
Everyone participates in the carnival of the famished. It is winter if not summer. The shyest of the shy versify in the darkness, beers in hand.
Oprah shouts out “Bonjour Montreal!” before carrying on.
All the cameras of the United States follow this singing allegory on two legs who is presenting a novelistic allegory in the guise of a final outburst for a new novel. Thank you to our sponsors.
André Roy is delighted. He gently nudges Francis Farley-Chevrier, who usually avoids group celebrations. They are at the entrance of the Lion d’Or. All of Montreal’s literati are there. The thirsty, the neurotics, the followers, the temperamentals, and the Slovaks. André Roy is delighted. He talks of a historic moment, and everyone agrees with him.
Today, the arts cavalry is galloping in unison. All those in the Montreal world of letters are stamping on the floor of the Lion d’Or. Fernand Durepos makes a few vague remarks to Jean-Sébastien Larouche, monsieur Dacnomanie. Nearby, Robbert Fortin pats the head of Tristan Malavoy’s young son. The party has begun. Jean-François Poupart, just coming in, greets Jean-Marc Desgent, who’s following him. Jean-Marc is holding Annie Darveau’s hand. No one lingers at the door. Jean-Paul Daoust, more fit than an Iron Man, pops in, making a funny comment.
Sitting at the first table, a lustful and tender Benoît Chaput thinks of a retort, while Éric de Larochellière gives his caustic opinion on the state of Quebec letters.
Daniel Canty is lost in thought, musing on Alice and his ongoing translation of Stephanie Bolster, while also getting some new ideas for Marie Brassard’s Peepshow (he’s her dramaturgy consultant). Another Daniel, the American Daniel C. Dennett, is busy discussing his new book, Sweet Dreams: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics, with the young philosopher-to-be, Erik Bordeleau.
Hanging back, with a luminous face and mischievous eyes, Oana Avasilichioaei waves to Erín Moure so that she spots her through the crowd. A consummate multi-tasker, the young poet/one-woman-orchestra is jotting down a scene set in a Vancouver park while playing with the cocktail umbrella of her neon-green drink.
Smiling back at a persuaded reader, emboldened by the success of his new novel How to Become a Monster, Jean
Barbe still feels some unease before this literary display of sequins and glitter. Meanwhile, a few metres away at the bar, Perrine Leblanc orders a lemon Perrier.
Steve Savage never strays far from his pretty girlfriend. Alain Farah, who doesn’t get out much, is talking about meeting Olivier Cadiot. David Leblanc listens while Geneviève Gravel-Renaud leaves to find a chair. There’s a lack of chairs, and all these lovely people are leaning on the venue’s north wall. Near the stage, during Oprah’s long comical tremolo, Claude Beausoleil purses his lips politely at Yolande Villemaire, who is concentrating on the vocalizations of the hostess.
Near the northernmost central column, Robert Giroux and François Hébert seem to appreciate their grey hair, each with a champagne glass in hand, found who knows where, while next to them Raymond Martin is talking with Marie-Hélène Montpetit, flanked by Éric McComber.
But the show wouldn’t be the same without Pierre Ouellet, Paul Bélanger, and Philippe Beck hiding in a corner near the washrooms, debating a specific aspect of William Carlos Williams’s work.
At the same moment when the familiar refrain of Adamo’s song distorts the air, Stéphane Despatie takes Corinne Chevarier’s hand, slightly brushing her right breast. Everybody at the bar pretends not to be looking at them. Attentive yet dissolute, Maxime Catellier, beer in hand, bends over backwards telling Shawn Cotton an anecdote about Burroughs. The bar is full. Samuel Beckett sips an amaretto sour while saying something to Charles Bolduc, whom no one recognizes.
Nadine Bismuth is standing by the emergency exit, taping her foot to the music. She kisses Yves P. Pelletier, who imitates Stromgol for about three seconds before taking off in search of a martini. Carole David, wearing a long cape, avoids Yves Boisvert, who in turn avoids Chrystine Brouillet. Boisvert will get his due; he’ll be speaking in Russian by the end of the evening. People are bustling around the book table. A book of tunes. Call-and-response songs, magazines, novels.
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