Elle Sera Personnage

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Elle sera personnage

Nicole Brossards writing of the self

1 Nicole Brossards resistance to autobiography is long-standing and well-docu-mented. In her Journalintime, she wrote: Le journal ne me suffit pas. Ne meconvient pas. Cest une forme dcriture qui exige trop de moi et pas assez de ceque je suis1. Elaborating on this idea some fifteen years later, she described

sa rsistance toute forme de tmoignage, autobiographie, mmoire,journal intime, roman, bref tout ce qui scrivait sous le nom de cettechose qui portait le nom de prose et qui, selon elle, ne faisait que renforcercette curiosit malsaine et sculaire que nous avons pour le dj-vu delme humaine dans ses comportements les plus quotidiens comme lesplus extraordinaires, les plus primaires comme les plus sophistiqus. 2

2 In a further elucidation of this theme, Brossard explains her reluctance toventure into autobiographical territory as grounded in her conviction that this isnot where the (writing) self resides and matters:

In the bookShe Would Be the First Sentence of My Next Novel, [] I saythat my reserve when it comes to writing down my life constitutes myreserve of images, of hope and of energy. I also say that my resistance to

writing down my lived experience is a way to reserve myself for theessential, the intuited matter that would take the form of what I wouldlater call theoretical fiction.3

3

Alongside this professed refusal of the autobiographical, we find in Brossardswork an obsessive literary and philosophical engagement with the idea andcontours of the fictional character. Evoking her first forays into the romanes-que in her 1987 novel Le dsert mauve, she describes a significant shift in her

writing, marked primarily by a new relationship to the personnage. Whereasin earlier less novelistic fictions, she had always grasped words de manire ce quils supplantent en importance personnages et rcit, she was now takingthe time to love her characters, de leur donner une identit et de les entourerdun paysage (ESP10, 12). Indeed, Brossards subsequent prose writings reflecther persistent fascination with the personnage. But the relationship betweenauthor and characters is never a simple one.

4 Brossards narrative fictions are full of characters who are writers, characterswho are narrators, narrators who are characters, and their fluid roles frequentlyspill back and over the author herself, blurring the lines of authorial identity andagency. From the moment in Le dsert mauve when Brossard places fictionalauthor Laure Angstelle into dialogue with fictional translator Maude Laures onlyto have Maude Laures then bring the character Angela Parkins into theirconversation to speak for herself and challenge her author directly, we sense

what may be at stake for Brossard in the writing of a novel. The complex statusof the character offers her a way to keep her distance from the trop de moi ofautobiography in order to begin to approach the ce que je suis of her theoret-

ical fictions. The selfin Brossards novels is indeed theoretical for the character,in its multiple and indeterminate identities and positionings, enables her to


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Karen McPherson Elle sera personnage: Nicole Brossards writing of the self

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engage with fundamental questions about authority and agency, the real and theimagined, the being behind the voice, and the identity of the other. Through hermany characters, Brossard is asking what it means to write (a woman) into

being4.

5 If the character sets the scene for a play on identity, the fluid and mutable first-person pronoun, the narrativeje shimmering and circulating through Brossardshybrid texts, poses the autobiographical question. One cannot ignore thedifferent pronouns at play in Brossards writings, especially the jes and ellesdancing circles around the reader and each other. But the errant Ispeaks mostclearly and persistantly of the complex interactions between narrative and

being. Several of Brossards recent works are punctuated by first-personrefrains: Je suis une femme du prsent in Elle serait la premire phrase, Jesuis l inLhorizon du fragment, and Je suis partout o je suis inLa capturedu sombre. And in every case, the narrating I at some point reveals hercomplicated relationship with others in the text with whom she may share that

subject position (whether these be other character/narrators or authorialpersonae). In her essay on Hier, Louise Dupr observes how [b]etween th[e]narrator who claims the story and thepersona of the author, we observe a subtleplay of mirrors and she notes that this is a frequent technique in thepostmodern novel (NE 86). What distinguishes Brossards work for Dupr,however, is not primarily its postmodern approach to narrative but moreimportantly its poetic sources and nature. The play of pronouns and subjectpositions is less about ludic plot twists and more about voices. Unlike novelistsnovels which rely heavily on plotting, poets novels place a voice in theforeground, an intimate, inner voice [] which always seeks to give witness to a

vision of the subjective, personal world (NE 85). One might conclude fromDuprs description, using terms like intimate, subjective and personal,that she would associate Brossards poetic narratives within an autobiographicalgenre. But in fact, referencing the work of Dominique Combe, she makes thepoint that the lyric or poetic I is neither autobiographical nor fictional, but asubject who tends toward generalisation and universalisation(NE92). Perhapsit is this marrying of the intimate and universal that most accurately defines theBrossardian subject with her untethered pronouns illustrating this subjectsfundamentally relational nature. Dupr makes a similar observation aboutHier:an intimate voice can be felt, corresponding to this Je est un autre [] thatindividuals inevitably encounter in themselves when they plunge into their ownidentity (NE93).

6 Considering some of Brossards early engagements with questions of narrativesubjectivity and examples of self-writing in three of her more recent projects, Ipropose to show that Brossards work, while containing many elements that weconsider to be autobiographical, dramatically nuances these categories. I willfurther undertake to reveal how her writings enacther theorizing of the autobio-graphical in order to subvert, trouble and perhaps even ultimately transform ourunderstanding of the autobiographical project.

7 In her preface to the 1998 reissue of Brossards Lamr, ou le chapitre effrit5,Louise Dupr notes that the works first readers focused primarily on its portethorique, tending to overlook the more personal aspects that are perhaps


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more evident to readers a decade later: Bref, il y a l un autobiographisme qui,faisant contrepoint aux autres livres de Nicole Brossard, incarne la textualit(Prface 9). Citing Brossards own affirmation of a subjectivity grounded in theprimacy of writing rather than in any individual lived experience, Dupracknowledges the authors dmarche scriptuaire o lmotion ressentie la

lecture est plus intellectuelle que sentimentale but then goes on to declare thatLAmr reste lexception qui confirme la rgle (Prface 10)6. Clearly, Brossards1977 Lamr marked an important foray into the complex territory of narrativesubjectivity. It is there that she posed a question characteristic of her thorie/fiction: O commence le priv o sarrte le politique, le fictif, le rel? (55)7 Itis also there that she first inscribed the phrase for which she is perhaps bestknown: crireje suis une femme est plein de consquences (53). This strikingformulation exemplifies how fundamentally interconnected identity, gender and

writing are for Brossard. The embedded articulation je suis une femme doesthree things at once: it identifies and voices the first person (je); it performs that

persons identity through the linking of subject and verb copula (je suis); and itpredicates that identity on gender (je suis une femme). But embedded as it iswithin the implied condition whose consequences it also asserts (quand jcrisjesuis une femme il y a plein de consquences), it reflects (on) its own utterance,revealing a many-layered first-person pronoun that is both describing andaccomplishing the enunciative gesture, both in the present and in the future.

With the formulation of this signature phrase inLamr, Brossard accomplish-ed a significantly autobiographical (self-writing) gesture. Furthermore, one ofthe consequences of writing je suis une femme is that the woman in the text isreal(ized). Thus, echoing Duprs observation that in Lamr un autobiogra-phisme [] incarne la textualit, Alice Parker puts it bluntly: Henceforth theBrossardian text would have a womans body8.

8 Brossard continues to explore the territory of narrative subjectivity in herwritings throughout the 1980s, up to and including Le dsert mauve in 1987.Indeed, this novel, with its constant play along fictions many borders,represents one of the authors best known and most compelling ventures intothe territory of the narrative subject. But as Barbara Godard notes, with herprobing of the boundaries and limits of the writing subject, Brossard is hereexploring strategies that she embraced throughout the 1980s, strategies that,

with significant variations, shaped Journal intime9. Journal intime wasoriginally commissioned for a series of Radio-Canada broadcasts in 1983 andpublished the next year under the title Journal intime, ou Voil donc unmanuscrit. The title suggests something of Brossards ambivalence toward theproject and signals from the beginning that this exercise in self-writing isconscious of its own problematic status as both literary and public. In theliminal pages of the published text Brossard writes: Le journal, moins quil neserve dannales, me semble tre un lieu o le sujet tourne en rond jusqu`lpuisement de lui-mme (JI9). She further explains that since on na quune

vie et tant dautres, she felt the need to insert after each journal entry ce quejappelle une posture du texte et un pome. Sans doute pour que rien nemchappe et que tout puisse commencer (JI 10). In general, Journal intime

maintains the borders of the genre of the writers diary with its chronologicalentries and more or less coherent first-person pronoun. But these borders are


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persistently nudged not only by the insertion of the postures and poems andthe texts own meta-commentary, but also by the liberties that the author takes

with the genres conventions, such as her inclusion of diary excerpts from earlieryears or her playful manipulations of chronological referents10. In BarbaraHavercrofts nuanced analysis of this texts htrognit nonciative, she con-

firms its place among Brossards ongoing subversions of the autobiographical:Se servir dun journal intime pour se prononcer rsolument contre le genre,

voil qui pourrait sembler antinomique. [] Au contraire, Nicole Brossardutilise prcisment sa propre rsistance pour renouveler le genre11 .

9 One focus of Havercrofts reading is on Brossards use of pronouns to signal therelationship between the writing subject and her others: [leJournal intime deBrossard] convoque plusieurs narrataires pronominaux et chaque pronomutilis est susceptible de renvoyer des rfrents fminins divers (HE 32).Given the Journals evident interest in the pronominal subject, it is interestingto consider that in Domaine dcriture, a short volume published by Brossard

the following year, the autobiographical markers of a subject seem to bestrikingly absent12. There are no personal pronouns; these poems are largelyconstructed around fragments, infinitives, and impersonal constructions, with amajor refrain being variants on rien ne pouvait plus scrire13. Where/what isthe subject here? This domaine dcriture apparently uninhabited bynarrator, writer, speaker, character is a what without a who. But a closerreading then suggests that the missing subject may in fact be hiding, that the

writing itself may be seeking its subject14. This suspicion first arises with thededication ( qui en ce domaine) and is reinforced with repeated references tothe phrase sur le qui-vive which speaks metaphorically of a state of alertness

but linguistically contains the question of the existence of a being. In the finalpages ofDomaine, the poems seem to approach the missing subject. After a firstindication of a possible first person: la langue sinstalle en automatisme dumoi (DE45), there follows a suggestive transformation of the sur le qui-viveexpression: la fiction reconstitue les actes du corps de ses penses et certitudede ltre en qui-vive (DE 46, bold in original). Previously only words and

writing had been described as sur le qui-vive. Now there is a being, one whoseems to have been there all along but who finally makes her appearance in the

books closing passage, naming herself and voicing her desire: Pendant cetemps, sur le qui-vive,jaimedans lindistincte ralit, la tempe appuye sur lamain libre, un peu parler de vivre comme une manire de faire des signes (DE47, emphasis added in bold).

10 IfDomaine dcriture is tentatively seeking its missing subject, Installations,published in 1989, could be read as an explosive response to that search. The fulltitle of the volume is Installations (avec et sans pronoms) and the entire workseems to be about pronouns15. A significant number of the poems are indeedwithout pronouns, but the vast majority contain a first-person pronominalsubject boldly declaring itself. A line in the opening poem describes and affirmsthe speaking (narrating) subject as a starting point (toutefois je vivais lrelance/ le rve [IN 9]) and then a series of first-person pronouns repeatedly

voices their presence in the poems that follow16. In addition, a line in the poemInstallation suggests that the installations of this volume concern the


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the challenge of writing the self. Yet whereas the inserted postures and poemsinJournal intime were in counterpoint to the journal entries, here the differenttexts bleed into one another so thoroughly that by the end of the book the voicedeclaring je suis l is speaking from within the titled sections. A number of theshort pieces in this collection show Brossard grappling directly with the question

of autobiography, reflecting once again on her relationship to pronouns, anddrawing her self-portrait as a series of personnages. But it is in the accompa-nying untitled texts that many of these theoretical reflections play out mosttellingly. In a passage following La Question de lAutobiographie, the narratordeftly complicates the question:

Jcris depuis ce matin et je comprends que je suis dans un autre monde.Alors, dans cet autre monde, il se pourrait que je sois quelquun dautre.Sil est vrai que quand jcris je suis ailleurs, je sais que je ne suis jamaisquelquun dautre quand jcris. (HF51).

13 Similarly, in the section called Les Pronoms, the narrator explains that [sa]mfiance envers un usage de plus en plus rpandu du je tient sans doute au faitque lintrospection ne constitute pas une ncessit, un a priori pour crire (HF76). For Brossard the writing comes first since the work of writing is to realize itssubject. She thus articulates the important role of pronouns in opening up thenarrative space:

Je mise dabord et avant tout sur la matire linguistique pour dgagerlhorizon, ouvrir un passage. Je veux travailler dans lexcs du pronom,travailler son ombre, son flou et signer au scalpel. Sujet dlicat. Je veux dumouvement dans la mmoire archive du pronom. (HF76)

14 And in fact she has already accomplished this in the untitled passage that imme-diately precedes this section, where the narration moves through unsettlingpronoun shifts and referential sleights of hand that both declare and subvert thetexts autobiographical status:

Je suis l. Debout au milieu dune grande salle du Muse des beaux Arts deMontral o lon prsente une exposition sur les annes 60. Je fus l, petitpoint dombre dans le coin gauche de la photo [] Nous fmes l dans les

botes chansons [] les odeurs doctobre et de rvolution, tu avais unetelle soif de connaissance et de justice. Vous nous regardiez trangement

[] Tu crivaisFrench Kiss. [] Parfois celle qui te ressemble sapprochaitde toi, intime comme un personnage. On laimait [] (HF69-70)20

15 This is a typical example of Brossardian characters who are, as Dupr noted,creatures of language, born from the words (NE 91)21. What Dupr finds in

Hier seems to be characteristic ofLhorizon du fragmentas well as of much ofBrossards recent writing: Subjects create themselves in language and so createthrough fiction some possibilities for agency (NE93) 22.

16 IfLhorizon du fragment nuances its own self-writing in ways that subvert,trouble and may ultimately transform our understanding of the (theoretical)

dimensions of the autobiographical project, two other recent Brossardian textsoffer striking enactments of her engagement with the subject of self-writing: the


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novelHier and the playfully autofictive workElle serait la premire phrase demon prochain roman23.

17 Any one of Brossards novels might be cited as an example of self-realizingnarrative performance, but Hier, with its scripting and staging of the death ofDescartes, may be the most explicit24. One might well ask why Descartes ishaunting not only [the fictional novelist] Carlas text and consciousness but thetext and consciousness of Hier as well and answer that a focus not onDescartes death but on his dying is a way to interrogate being [by] stag[ing] theencounter of being and nothingness25. But I would go even further and suggestthat any enactment of being will at some point stumble into Descartes whosesingular subject (the cogito) is an underpinning for so much modern thoughtabout the subject. Alice Parker thus describes Brossards return to Descartes as afeminist reclamation of the drama of subjectivity :

Cartesian thought continued to influence western metaphysics and franco-phone culture well into the twentieth century. [] Brossard chooses torestage the final moments of the philosophers life, his passage from thematerial realm []. Significantly, the drama is filtered through theconsciousness and sensibility of Carla and her mother, recounted, re-cited,re-enacted, refracted through the lens of gender as one scenario followsanother.26

18 But there is a second narrative of being that weaves its way through this novel, apage of text described by the narrator as having been discovered in a museumlibrary:

je suis tombe sur un feuillet dactylographi []. Il marrive de la relire

plusieurs fois dans une mme journe. [] Je ne crois pas que la page aitfait partie dun journal intime. Peut-tre dun roman. [] Aujourdhui, jaimmoris la page. Elle fait dsormais partie de moi [] (H46)

19 What is this page and why is it then inserted five times into the novel? When weread it, we discover that it narrates the encounter between a je and another

woman:

Elle me regarde avec une intensit qui me dissout dans la premirelumire de laube. Son visage, monde vivide, je ne sais plus si jexiste dansun clich ou si jai un jour exist dans la blancheur du matin devant cette

femme aux gestes lents [] Je suis cette autre. [] Maintenant le regardde la femme sengouffre dans le futur. (H49)

20 The resonance between the central phrase Je suis cette autre and the earlierdescription of the page (Elle fait dsormais partie de moi) illustrates theimbrication of the subject of writing and the writing subject. But I would arguethat the repeated return to this page also invites us to read it in counterpoint tothe cogito represented by Descartes haunting presence. The philosophers jepense donc je suis already challenged by the event of his dying and therelating of and to that event by the women gathered around his deathbednow stands in contrast to a different affirmation of being: elle me regarde (in

both senses of the term : she looks at me and she matters to me) and je suiscette autre.


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21 A second text that dramatically enacts Brossards writing self is Elle serait lapremire phrase de mon prochain roman, published in 1998. In its ceaselessplay betweenje and elle, this hybrid text inscribes both a determined resistanceto any fixed inscription of a self and a je that throughout the book neverthelessrepeatedly declares herself: Je suis une femme du prsent. The books title sets

up this play on identity through the polysemy of the pronoun elle. Occupying theplace of a personal pronoun, a subject, a person, and (by way of the conditional

verb copula) also a sentence, she focuses both present and anticipated futurenarratives on the stakes (for a woman) of self-writing. The title also establishes afundamental and ongoing relationship between that elle and the je behind thetitles utterance (the je of mon prochain roman). The cover signature mighttempt us to equate this je with Brossard, but early extradiegetic references,offering tantalizing hints of apacte autobiographique, immediately trouble thatpact through the use of a third person narration: Depuis la parution de sondernier roman Le Dsert mauve [] elle semblait stre rconcilie avec la

prose (ESP 10). The errancy of the texts pronouns and the complex ways inwhich they alternate and share subject positions becomes more and moreobvious. References to son prochain roman fracture the identification ofnarrator and novelist but then the novelists obsession with and possiblediscovery of her novels subject seem to reconfigure their connection:

De tout cela nous avions longuement parl un soir de juillet en marchantdans les rues de Montral. Cte cte, bras dessus, bras dessous commedes amies de longue date. Il y avait maintenant plus dun an quelle pensait son prochain roman et ce soir-l, peut-tre en avait-elle trouv le sujet,elle tait particulirement fbrile. (ESP52)

22 This passage hints at the possibility that finding her subject arises in someintimate way from the encounter with the other woman. In its subversions of theautobiographical pact, this book seems to be making the bold claim that she mayindeed be the subject of my story. The most striking evidence for this ideaoccurs in the caf scene near the end of the book. Rapprochements among

women are a hallmark of Brossards fiction. In this case, the meeting of threewomen happens both in the caf and in the text. In the caf they observe oneanother and notice a resemblance:

Il devait tre six heures du matin, lorsquune femme est entre dans lerestaurant. Nous nous sommes alors exclames en mme temps: commeelle vous ressemble! La femme sinstalle une table au fond. Tout au fond.Elle sort un grand cahier [. ] (ESP130)

23 But several pages later, in the text, the subject has shifted:Six heures du matin. Le restaurant est dsert. Les femmes que javaisremarques mon arrive sont maintenant parties. (ESP136)

24 There follows an italicized passage that might be what this woman narrator iswriting in her notebook:

Jcris en pensant mon prochain roman. Elle sera personnage, mesurprendra chaque phrase. [] Elle sera pote. Je ne cderai pas la


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vraisemblance l o le malheur est toujours trop prs des femmes. I wantthis she alive. (ESP138, English in original)

25 Here we see that for the je the elle, object of desire, is both character andwriter, subject and text. She then writes, Jcris: je sais ce quest la ralit parce

que je suis une femme dimagination (ESP140), but in another abrupt series ofshifts, thejes and elles in the text then begin to flash and turn like mirrors in thesunlight:

Dehors, les bruits de la circulation. La vie fait sens un matin de plus. Dansquelques instants, jexiste encore au prsent. Maintenant, elle ferme soncahier de notes, se lve, se dirige vers la sortie du Lux. Dans le matinensoleill de juillet, je pense mon prochain roman [.] (ESP 142,emphasis added)

26 And finally, the ending of this sentence inscribes its multiple and relationalsubject in a litany of three first-person declarations (following that je pense withits Cartesian echoes):

Dans le matin ensoleill de juillet, je pense mon prochain roman commeon dit,je mdite une forme, je me rflchis ouje limagine quelques motsplus loin, quelques mois plus tard [] (ESP142, emphasis added)

27 We cannot miss theje mdite embedded in the first phrase, moving the thinkingje into the realm of writing. Then the self-reflection and the imagination of theother (woman) are related, with the conjunction ou making them possiblyinterchangeable. This passage is emblematic of why it makes sense to readBrossard as both a feminist theorist of identity and a self-fictionalizing author

(fictionalizing not herself but the self/selves). Throughout her corpus we findher reflecting on the je and imagining the elle even as her writings persist incalling the category of self-writing into question. And ultimately, at each step ofthe way, we find ourselves where she started, with the signature phrase crire

je suis une femme est plein de consquences. Indeed, this phrase closes Elleserait la premire phrase de mon prochain roman (opening it to the future):

je mdite une forme, je me rflchis ou je limagine quelques mots plusloin, quelques mois plus tard, ctait dans une salle de confrence, elletait sur le point de terminer la lecture de son texte en disant: crire jesuis une femme est plein de consquences. (ESP142)27

28 With this embedded utterance, Brossard says what she has been saying all along,that as we create ourselves in language and invent ourselves in texts, thesegestures are both real and consequential. Something happens in the writing thatmakes identity matter.

Karen McPhersonUniversity of Oregon


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1 Journal intime (henceforthJI), second edition, Montreal, Les Herbes rouges, 1998 [1984], 65. I quotefrom the 1998 edition.

2 Elle serait la premire phrase de mon prochain roman (henceforth ESP), Toronto, Mercury Press,1998. This passage in the third person calls into question Lejeunes pacte autobiographique as, intypical Brossardian fashion, the author makes herself a character in the story she is telling.

3 A State of Mind in the Garden, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 4:4, 2000, 39. Significantly, Brossardhere claims narrative authority for statements originally articulated in the third person: sa rservedevant la ralit et lillusion qui la rcompose []doit tre comprise comme la mise distance dunmonde dans lequel, she knows by all means that she as a she is not even in the sentence, cannot geteven with the sentence. [] Cette distance constitue sa rserve dimages, despoir, et dnergie. [] ilntait pas exclure que sa rsistance la prose fut une faon de se rserver pour lessentielle, matireintuitionne qui prendrait la forme de ce quelle appellera fiction thorique (ESP34, 38). The self-displacement evident in the English sentence further complicates the agency and positioning of thewriting self.

4 In Baroque daube (Montreal, d. Qubec Amrique, 2001), the realization and agency of thepersonnage is explicitly foregrounded in a passage describing a narrators relationship to hercharacter(s): Le personnage peut sombrer dans le vaste des possibilits, multiplier les miroirs. [] Ilfaut que lombre vraie du dsir recouvre lombre vraie du personnage. Elle dessine toujours le mmeverbe tre repli sur soi en forme de collier autour du nombril. On peut se rapprocher du

personnage (112, italics in original). In Novels on the Edge (henceforth NE), in Nicole Brossard:Essays on Her Works (ed. Louise Forsyth, Toronto, Guernica Editions, 2005), Dupr noted thatcharacters in BrossardsHier are created in the present through the process of enunciation (91).

5 Prface. Du propre au figur (henceforth Prface) is Duprs introduction to Lamr ou le chapitreeffrit (henceforth Lamr), Montreal, lHexagone, 1988 [1977]. I quote from the 1988 edition ofLamr.

6 Reference is to a 1982 interview in which Brossard remarked: Je sais que pour beaucoup de femmesla souffrance est lorigine de lcriture; pour moi, lcriture est lorigine de lcriture (quoted inPrface 10). InMothers of Invention (Montreal, McGill Queens UP, 2002), Milna Santoro notes thatwhile Brossard herself may explicitly call LAmr fiction [], she is also challenging the distinctionbetween fiction and autobiography (194).

7 This was the first novel to which Brossard affixed the label thorie/fiction. Both Santoro and Alice A.Parker (Liminal Visions of Nicole Brossard, New York, Peter Lang, 1998) offer insightful readings of

Lamr and fiction/theory. Santoro points out, however, that this subtitle only appeared in thenovels second edition (307 note 86) and that [Brossards] own classification of thorie/fiction []tells only part of the story, forLAmr even transgresses the limits of such an embracing label (205).

8 ParkerLiminal Visions 7. It is also Parker who refers to this key sentence as Brossards signature (7).9 Godard, Life (in) Writing: Or a Writing Machine for Producing the Subject in Forsyth, 205.10 There are entries labelled with markers like Dix heures vingt et une secondes and others that are

purposely misdated.11 Htrogenit nonciative et renouvellement du genre: le Journal intime de Nicole Brossard

(henceforthHE),Voix et Images 22:1, 1996, 25.12 Domaine dcriture (henceforth DE), Montreal. d. nouvelle barre du jour, 1985. In Stratgies du

vertige (Montreal, ditions du remue-mnage, 1989), Louise Dupr situates Domaine at thebeginning of une nouvelle priode formaliste in the poets work. Duprs reading of Brossardspoetry of this period includes an analysis of Le Je en Jeu in which she notes that [o]n assiste au

dplacement incessante dun sujet qui ne se considre pas comme fix dans le symbolique, mais quicontinue son exploration, dplace les frontires, la barre (95). It seems, however, that beginning withLamr we see the focus shifting away from what Dupr describes as [une] subjectivit qui [semble]cache[r] la nostalgie dune unit perdue, dune intgralit retrouver (88) to try to imagine adifferent (multiple, mutable, relational) subject altogether.

13 Phrases like il tait permis de croire and sur la ligne se pencher de lveil du soupon are typical ofthe fragmentary, impersonal nature of this text. The opening phrase Rien ne pouvait plus scrire isrepeated and then transforms into ctait crire, an insistant refrain. I am grateful to Louise Forsythfor drawing my attention to the startling absence of personal voice in this work.

14 Near the middle of the text we encounter a line that suggests that this writing is all too aware of whatit is paradoxically both resisting and seeking : leffet sournois du vrai la tentation dcrirefamilirement(DE26, bold in original).

15 Installations (avec et sans pronoms) (henceforthIN), Trois-Rivires, crits des Forges, 1989.16 A few representative lines: vrai dire je moriente (IN11); je mtends et prpare de longs touchers

(IN14); je fais attention / quand je rve avec ma langue (IN18); je parlerai dhorizon (IN20); je


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mabsorbe dans limaginaire (IN 45); jattrape la vie comme un livre rcent (IN 82); je jouednergie contre la mort (IN105); je veille sous les toiles (IN125).

17 Lhorizon du fragment (henceforth HF), Paroisse Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, ditions Trois-Pistoles,, 2004.

18 HF, cover flap.19 La capture du sombre,Ottawa, Lemac, 2007.The corresponding passage in this novel : Depuis hier,

[] envie dcrire lentement un livre dans une langue qui ne serait pas la mienne. [] je veux plongerdans le paysage dun monde provisoire (5).

20 The most striking twist in this dance of pronouns is the extradiegetic reference in Tu crivais FrenchKiss. Brossard published a novel called French Kiss in 1974. Who/where is the author andwho/where is the narrator here ?

21 Dupr here quotes Jean-Yves TadisLe rcit potique.22 Lhorizon du fragment in many ways illustrates the potique des diffrences to which Barbara

Havercroft refers in her analysis of the complex and contested state of contemporary autobiographicaldiscourse. Havercroft concludes Le discours autobiographique: enjeux et carts, (Lucie Bourassa[ed.], La discursivit, Quebec, Nuit blanche, 1995), with the suggestion that such a conceptualapproach might best accommodate les divers types actuels de sujets autobiographiques since[s]elon cette conception, les sujets autobiographiques des textes contemporains seraient produits

par et dans le discours, ils deviendraient des lieux de diffrences (les leurs et celles des autres sujets),sans contours figs (178, emphasis added).23 Elle serait la premire phrase may not fit into a precisely defined concept of autofiction, but one

might nonetheless consider it a work of auto-fiction in its inventive inscription of the authors manyselves.

24 Hier (henceforthH), Montreal, d. Qubec Amrique, 2001.25 Karen McPherson, Since Yesterday : Nicole Brossards Writing After Loss in Forsyth, 60-61.26 Parker, Performativity inHier in Forsyth, 74-5.27 This conclusion also offers another way to read the books title. For Brossard, this sentence is always

the starting point for what comes next. It is la premire phrase.

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Elle Sera Personnage