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"Tragedy Houses My Wound" 1990
- University of Ottawa Press
- Chapter
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Andre Carpentier Translated by Wayne Grady TRAGEDY HOUSES MY Womo Andre Carpentier was born in Montreal on October 29, 1947. He graduated from the Universite du Quebec a Montreal in 1973 with a masters degree in literature, and is a short-story writer and novelist. He helped edit the visualarts magazineUEcran in 1974, and the next year became the assistant director of the International Pavilion of Humour at Montreal's Man and His World, a position he held until 1980. During this time, he organized a collective of comicstrip artists called La Bande dessinee kebecoise whosework appeared in the journal La Barre dujour. He also published articles in La Presse, Moebius, and Le Livred'ici. Carpentier's first two novellas,Axel et Nicholas and Memoires d'Axel, were publishedjointly in Montreal in 1973, and his novel, L 'aigle volera a travers le soleil, followed in 1978. But it was with the publication of his first collection of short stories, Rue Saint-Denis (1978) that he first came into prominence as a writer of highly intellectual,somewhat difficult works of short fiction. One of the stories in it, "Les sept reves et la realite de Perrine Blanc,"translated by Wayne Grady as "The Seven Dreams and the Reality of Perrine Blanc,"concerned a woman undergoing a slow process of disintegration at the hands of her psychologist, who was directing her dream therapy. Carpentier's most recent collection of stories, De ma blessure atteintet autres detresses (1990), further explores his interest in the fantastic and the psychology of control. The story included here, translated by Grady as "Tragedy Houses My Wound," is the title story from that collection. "Tragedy Houses My Wound" is a translation of "De ma blessure atteint" published in De ma blessure atteint et autres detresses (Montreal: XYZ, 1990). TRAGEDY HOUSESMY WOUND 395 One of my constant preoccupations is trying to understand how other people canexist. .. — Fernando Pessoa Where would I go, if I could go; what would I be, if I could be; what would I sayif I had a voice: who is this who calls himselfme? — Samuel Beckett very day lately there is this uncontrollable shaking, to the point where any sense of my own precariousness is completely shattered. Alone in my house in the Lakes region south of Riviere-du-Loup, I am slowly giving in to the contraction of light. I am ridding myself of the realityof others, I want my mind to need nothing but the symbols of self-denial, the indices of nonexistence. Little by little, my mind has lost all sense of connectedness; I am no longer capable of anything more complicated than saying whether certain randomly chosen chambers of thought are close together or far apart, and most of them are far apart. I am opening this story anywhere, with a semi-abstract scene related to me on the phone a few minutes ago by Seraphin Lange, whom I have sent to deliver a message to someone we used to call Toucheur. In the scene, Toucheur has stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk and is absorbed, as I'd hoped he would be, in the examination of a specimen of handwritingwhose characters are harmoniously but irregularly modulated, in which the angles vary from zero to ninety degrees, a trait also seen in the model. The axis is irregular and the individual letters are crowded together. The looped ascenders all seem to lean to the left, the non-looped ones to the right. There are three curliques that appear unattached to any corresponding letters; the upstrokes and downstrokes alternate and complement one another in a way that creates a satisfying equilibrium . The connectors between letters are thin to the 396 ANDRE CARPENTIER E [54.160.243.44] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:24 GMT) point of invisibility, but the ovals seem well joined at the top. The opening flourish of the first capital letter becomes a solid downstroke that loops at the bottom, swings and thickens to the right, and ends by underlining the rest of the first word; the second capital—and here aesthetics overrides the rules of grammar—begins with a similar loop that continues across the top of the final word. The preposition, isolated between these two upper-cased words by narrow spaces on either side, is written as though in a different font; more like printing—with serifs, a short, thick horizontal stroke, and a lopsided "o" that looks like a fat drop of water...