For France Theoret, personal truths are much more important than political theories FRANCE THEORET is a veteran of the Quebec writing scene, though she`s only recently come across the linguistic border into English, thanks to two story collections published in 1992: The Tangible Word (Guernica; Barbara Godard, translator) and The Man Who Painted Stalin (Mercury; Luise von Flotow, translator). The word "story" is used advisedly, for Theoret would probably prefer the more ambiguous, postmodem term texte, which the French use to designate anything written. In her starkly modem apartment in a Montreal high-rise, over a cup of herbal tea, Theoret talked with David Homel about how a former literature teacher from a modest background came to be one of Quebec`s better-known feminist writers. BiC: I`m happy to be able to talk to someone who incarnates current feminist writing, and who can help me understand what`s happening on the postmodern scene. Let`s start from the beginning. You left teaching to write full time, a move many contemplate but few actually make. France Theoret: I had been wanting to do it, and finally took the plunge in 1987. 1 was 44 at the time, and I`d been teaching literature at Ahuntsic College for 19 years. BiC: That move must have changed your uniting, Theoret: Of course. When I was teaching, I wrote essays and critical articles during the year, and fiction in the summer. In 1987, when I left teaching, first I finished The Man Who Painted Stalin. Then I moved onto the second half of Etrangete, l`etreinte [literally, Strangeness, the Embrace]. I went on to do a collection of essays, Entre raison et deraison, that will be translated into English soon. I finished all the manuscripts I had from my teaching days. Since I was writing every day, I started moving toward the novel. In the meantime, I wrote a literary journal that will be published later this year. BiC: Why did you choose Stalin? For those of us of Russian background, he`s anything but a metaphor. The young man who would be a painter in the story doesn`t come up with that image until the last pages. Mind you, it`s an excellent title. Theoret: I knew from the very start that this young man would paint Stalin. That image was my guide through the writing. And while I was describing a relationship, I was also criticizing the intellectual class and the doctrinaire left. BiC: University teachers have a rough time in that book. Theoret: That`s no accident! BiC: Because you know the milieu? Theoret; Very well! BiC: The book gives us a Portrait of young people trying to live according to a leftist ideology, and not quite nuking it. Where does that come from - your own experience? Theoret: I was never involved in that kind of left. But I did know plenty of people in that situation, people you would never have expected to get into the left. In the 1960s they were into art, they were crazy about reading, into the creative arts. Then they veered into a kind of doctrinaire leftism - I`m talking about livingroom lefties. Remember, this was at the beginning of the 1970s. BiC: What have they become since then? Theoret: No one knows. They haven`t been heard from. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, they have been lying low, hiding out in the universities and colleges. BiC: Why go after the intellectuals that way? Where does that attack come from? Theoret: Let`s just say I was personally affected by that atmosphere. I was a woman who loved literature and wanted to write, but my men friends refused to accept their own natural inclinations in that direction. Back then, it was a lot harder for a woman to get started in the arts. In the 1960s, I felt equal, but I guess I was mistaken. Still, I think it`s important to have an ideological position as part of your outlook on life. I`ve always thought it was important to have a critical attitude toward society. After all, I`m a feminist. But that doctrinaire way of being on the left is a negation of all the development in culture and thought. It was an anti-intellectual, primitivist left. BiC: Where does your left-wing thinking come from? Your family? Theoret: From books. From knowing people on the left. But I was never doctrinaire. Having read books and reflected, I certainly wasn`t going to regress into doctrine. BiC: Is that how your feminism started? As a revolt against an authoritarian left? Theoret: Not exactly. Though feminism was born around that time. BiC: In your last book in French, Etrangete, l`etreinte, you write of "Woman" - la femme. Who is this woman? An abstract, Platonic woman who represents all women? Why not give her a name? Theoret: If I remember correctly, I use that only in the last poem in the collection. Elsewhere in it, I do name my women: there`s "the woman with the porcelain smile" - that`s how she`s known. The last poem is marginal to the collection ... this woman is waiting for truth, but no woman can wait for truth. Unless it`s a personal truth, it`s false. The poem is logical and rational; it rails against the dialectic and the denouncer. It goes against the whole collection. I`m glad you saw it that way. In the collection, there`s a search for voice, and the voice is never unified, except in this poem, which is ... a "false" poem. I put it there on purpose, as a trap waiting to spring. BiC: You talk about the denouncer. Who is that? Theoret: A woman in a state of waiting. What`s all this business about waiting for truth? I`m not waiting for truth, unless it`s a personal one. BiC: Most of us learn in our literature classes that the "I" of the narrator is not the "I" of the writer herself. Hasn`t feminist writing brought these two together? Theoret: Not always. I play with that aspect a lot. BiC: In some of the texts, you speak of yourself. "I, France Theoret Hasn`t that been a goal of feminism: the right to tell one`s story unmasked, in a direct fashion? Theoret: A goal of feminism? A delicate question ... I`ll just talk about my own case. In Bloody Mary, I was speaking through a series of screens. Elsewhere, I wrote directly about myself, my lined hands as they wrote, my own body. There was a desire for mirroring. To show my own situation as I wrote. BiC: Let`s take the decision to write about your hands that are holding the pen. What`s the advantage of working that way, as opposed to creating an external character to carry the mail for you? Theoret: That reflects a stage in writing. One method doesn`t exclude the other. I wanted to radicalize the situation to get out of the business of representing the world. To show everything that was at stake. I haven`t given up on characters; I`m turning back to them now. I don`t want to join the radicalizing tradition, after all. BiC: Doesn`t the average reader, whoever that may be, still seek out the world`s representation in fiction? And isn`t all fiction selfrepresentational, to a certain extent? So do we always have to include the depiction of the act of creation in the creation itself? Theoret: Not at all. In Stalin there are no characters who write. No characters in the act of writing. BiC: The Tangible Word is a veritable grab-bag of elements, including a letter to a certain Norma and Lyliane. Are we meant to read it as a real letter? Theoret: Of course not! You have to understand that the collection comes from a particular period, back in 1978. We were interested in the breakdown of genres. The fragmentation of genres. Everything was fiction - a very broad word. It reflects a period of experimentation. BiC: What remains of the genres that were supposed to have been broken down? Theoret: Actually, to a certain degree, there`s been a return to genre. BiC: That`s a little disappointing after all those efforts to break down genres - or is it? Does every age have to do the same work? Theoret: In Quebec, the modernist movement worked on breaking down genres. Feminism in writing went about things a little differently. It mixed genres together. That`s how we got the woman as the writing subject. BiC: In English Canada, feminism works mostly through subject matter. The plot. In Quebec, feminist writers work on language, on selfreflection. Are you up on what`s happening in English-Canadian feminist work? Theoret: In Quebec, we don`t have the "winner" character in our novels. Authorial presence and language are important for us; that reflects the tendencies of the 1980s. But now, more and more, writers are trying out the novel. The novel changes everything. We`ll he seeing female characters who aren`t necessarily winners, but who are still involved in social interactions. What`s striking is the eroticism among Quebec women novelists. It`s the subject/object question all over again. But it`s not a mere inversion, wherein the man becomes an object. We want to have our say in the way the novel is being written. BiC: When a woman takes up a pen to write, is that act fundamentally different from when a man does it? Theoret: Probably not. But it depends on the angle you take. The male writer will have his angle. When I write I want to have mine. I want to talk about what I`ve learned from feminism. In the novel I`m working on now - the action is set in 1928 - my woman character has male models. My own models are women. Not all women of my generation can boast of that. BiC: You mention eroticism in women`s writing. What about those love scenes that populate our novels? Will a woman describe a love scene in a different way? That always seemed to be an important proving ground. Theoret: Men can`t write on behalf of women`s eroticism any more, and current women`s writing is spilling over with eroticism. My scenes are nothing compared to Pauline Harvey`s Un homme est une valse. Something has changed. Something we don`t see in de Beauvoir, or Gabrielle Roy, or Anne Hebert. BiC: How did you get started in writing? Theoret: I`d always wanted to write, even as an adolescent. I started in 1974 in Paris and haven`t stopped since. This, after a few missed chances and some literary associations. I was part of the Barre du Jour group between 1966 and 1969. BiC: How was it that, after those missed chances, you finally got going in 1974? Theoret: It sprang from a sense of failure. I had studied structural semantics in Paris with A. J. Greimas, the linguist. I started to get the feeling that I`d taken the wrong path. My writing began soon after, as a form of failure, a frustration at having made a wrong decision. BiC: Have you followed your translations into English? Theoret: I paid more attention to Barbara Godard`s translation than with what Luise von Flotow did, partly because I wasn`t able to with Luise`s, and partly because it was done so quickly. But I did exercise some vigilance in the area of punctuation, for example. BiC: Overall, Godard`s translation seems truer to your language than von Flotow`s ... let`s talk about your most recent collection in French, Etrangete, l`etreinte. It begins with the sentence, "Strangeness bears a woman`s name. " What is strangeness as a literary concept? Theoret: I wanted to write about a single word: etrangete. Strangeness is that which attracts us. It`s always attracted, never frightened me. When I was younger, I never experienced it as the inquietante etrangete that intellectuals talk about, as if what is strange is upsetting. On the contrary - it creates attraction. Otherness, the Other, is strange. What is strangeness? The silence of the woman with the porcelain smile. An autistic, subjugated character. Strangeness emerges from the characters. It`s our desire to meet others we feet are strange. We carry our strangeness inside us. It`s the love of the search for strangeness, the strangeness of life. BiC: When you talk about the woman as a bearer of strangeness, are you saying that women bear more strangeness than men? Or does the question have any meaning? Theoret: A woman who bears strangeness is a woman who doesn`t coincide with herself. The woman of strangeness is a woman with her otherness included. Can men possess strangeness? Yes, if they are willing to. The Surrealist male poets saw women as the possessors of strangeness. So I asked myself the question, What is a strange woman for women themselves? BiC: And not necessarily for Andre Breton. Theoret: Exactly. As a woman, I can see strangeness in myself and in other women. The search for love has no sex .... Can men be strange, you ask. Often, for me, a strange man is a man who says intelligent things! For the Surrealists, strangeness manifested itself through the body. BiC: I wouldn`t want to have been Nadja in Breton`s book, and have had to live up to someone else`s vision of strangeness, of romantic love .... In Stalin, poverty is an important theme. The young woman who has to scrape by on very little - Material questions are often left out in Quebec writing, as if all writers were free Of material concerns. Theoret: That`s probably autobiographical. I had years like that -of scraping by. With Stalin, I started out writing a novel about money. BiC: Part of feminism in writing was the fight to gain the same rights as men in the area of publishing, reviewing, etc. Has that fight succeeded? Theoret: Yes, I believe so. There are two things at play. Of course, to be published, but there`s another level. I want to speak the feminine. I don`t want to exclude the masculine, or talk about it only as a projection of the feminine. I want to create feminine characters, but not under the yoke of feminism or some ideology. I want to use the critique of language started by feminism. I`m not going to say that all women are strong and incarnate good, while men represent evil. I`m not a binary thinker. Putting facts into play is what interests me. BiC: Tell me about what you`re planning for the future. Theoret: I`m beginning a novel-writing cycle. For a feminist woman, the novel can be very compromising. That`s important to say. Because the novel isn`t black and white, it doesn`t accept the ideological mask; facts and values have the upper hand. Ethics, in the broad sense. In the novel, there`s no way I`ll be able to avoid conflict with feminism, because the unconscious begins to take over in the writing process. And therein lie the danger and the pleasure of the novel.