Nicole Brossard: Essays on Her Works ed. by Louise H. Forsyth (review)

1 52Women in French Studies Francophone Literatrues and Cultures Forsyth, Louise H., ed. Nicole Brossard: Essays on Her Works. Toronto: Guernica, 2005. Pp 255. ISBN 1-55071-233-0. $13.00. Professor Emérita Louise Forsyth's collection is the first critical anthology in English devoted entirely to Quebec authorNicole Brossard. In addition to Forsyth's introductory materials, it contains ten essays, most by recognized "Brossardiennes," including Barbara Godard (four-time translator ofBrossard), Alice Parker (author ofthe only English-language monograph on Brossard, Liminal Visions, from 1998), Louise Dupré, Karen McPherson, and Susan Knutson. Given Brassard's forty-year career, Forsyth wisely chooses to offer at the outset a helpful list ofacronyms for her works. Selected bibliographies ofBrossard's writings, ofthe studies and interviews devoted to her, as well as contributors' biographies conclude the volume. Such peripheral materials make this text a valuable introduction to the growing body ofscholarship on Brossard, offering signposts for the uninitiated even whilejudiciously pointing to the most important contributions to our understanding ofBrossard's key place in Quebec letters , and indeed, in women's literature worldwide. Apreviously unpublished Brossard poem, "Shadow, Soft etsoifi" introduces the volume. Brossard's sensual invitation, "viens m'embrasser" (14), seems a fitting opening to what is clearly a labor oflove for Forsyth herself, who translates and condenses an extended 2003 interview with Brossard into "Fragments ofa Conversation," in which the author reflects on her fetishes (words, the feminine body, the city, travel, silence, present/ce), on her relationship to narrative conventions such as characters, on specific works {Le sens apparent, Le désert mauve) and literary connivences, and on the potential ofwriting, for "[i]n writing , everything is possible" (20). Forsyth's introductory essay, "To Write: In the Feminine Is Heavy with Consequences" (sic), echoes the importance of the thematization and theorization ofécrire auféminin which has been at the heart ofBrossard's aesthetics since the seventies. Outstanding among the articles that follow is Louise Dupré's "Novels on the Edge," which places Brossard's latest postmodern novel, Hier (2001), within the specific tradition ofprose poetry in Quebec, because ofits tendency to eschew plot and character in favor ofvoice, ofpoetic time (Benjamin's Jetzzeit, or the a-present [87]) andflânerie, and ofa structure that "functions by displace- , ment, condensation and overdetermination" (94). Dupré's essay expertly buttresses the two articles that precede it, by McPherson and Parker, as well as the one that follows, by Claudine Potvin, all ofwhich negotiate and elucidate the polyphonic, hybrid textuality ??Hier. Forsyth's anthology presents studies of Brossard's most recent work first, followed by essays that deal with earlier titles. Potvin, for example, briefly contextualizes her analysis oíHier as a museum narrative by tracing Brossard's use of art and image in earlier novels. Using Picture Theory as her particular Book Reviews153 focus, Katharine Conley examines Brossard's use ofspatial poetics and the hologram as figures ofcreative potential in the quest to depict the feminine body and desire in writing. In "Our Last Chance for Silence," Catherine Campbell gives a nuanced reading of the tension between language and silence in Mauve Desert and Baroque at Dawn. The hologram returns in Susan Knutson's welcome comparison of Brossard's and Donna Haraway's interest in women's relationship with science, a comparison motivated by the fact that "they have both responded critically but without denial to the scientific and technological revolution that has changed what we as human beings are" (174). The final three articles bring together several of Brossard's works to illuminate specific themes. Susan Holbrook uses Kristeva's delirium to approach the trope oftranslation central to Brossard's aesthetics since the mideighties . Godard's recent translation oí Journal intime provides the springboard for her sweeping look at Brossard's "Life (in) Writing," from Un livre (1970) to Elle serait la première phrase de mon prochain roman (1998). Finally , Lynette Hunter examines the fascination and exigencies of writing the inédit, underscoring the moral action and agency that such a project implies. In any collection ofthis nature, some essays are more descriptive than analytical , more reverent than revealing. This is not unexpected in a volume that seeks to...