Postmodern Agents: Cultural Representation in Hubert Aquin’s Prochain épisode and Yolande Villemaire’s Meurtres à blanc

MARY JEAN GREEN Postmodern Agents: Cultural Representation in Hubert Aquin's Prochain episode and Yolande Villemaire's Meurtres ablanc Theorists of the spy novel have shown that its formulaic plots and interchangeable structural elements have been used as a means of representing the most serious cultural conflicts of our time. Profoundly a creation of the twentieth century/ the mechanisms and paraphernalia of the spy genre have registered the tensions between the individual and society engendered by modern life, as well as the struggle between IUS' and Ithem' enacted in two world wars and their cold war aftermath. In fact, John G. Cawelti and Bruce A. Rosenberg suggest that the daily lives of contemporary people constantly re-enact the plight of the secret agent, who must move unceasingly back and forth between mutually incomprehensible domains of experience.2 While in the hands of a Graham Greene or a John Ie Carre, the traditional situations of espionage may provide ground for sophisticated psychological and cultural analysis, even the two-dimensional characters and stock plots of popular thrillers like the James Bond series can, as Umberto Eco has shown, provide a representation of the conflicts that underlie our society. If the familiar structures of the popular genre have proven their aptitude for dealing with modern culture and its discontents, it is not surprising that in Quebec even serious, high-culture writers began to draw on them at a time, in the 1960s and 1970s, when Quebec culture was confronted with the dilemmas of the contemporary world. The most remarkable example of the serious spy novel in Quebec is, of course, Hubert Aquin's literary landmark Prochain episode, published in 1965. Given his own attraction to clandestine activity, both real and imaginary, the spy novel offered itself to Aquin as the framework on which to build his text, in which he used and subverted the structures of the genre in representing his own political dilemma and the historical dilemma of Quebec. In his use of the time-worn formulas, Aquin is profoundly selfconscious , and thus eminently postmodern. At every turn exposing the creaky mechanisms of the spy thriller, Aquin produced a parodic work that undermined many of the genre's basic assumptions while providing a background for his own struggles with a failed revolution. Almost ten years after the appearance of Prochain episode, a young Yolande Villemaire, often cited as an exemplar of Quebec postmodernism / produced, as her first published novel, Meurtres ablanc, a short UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 63, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1994 HUBERT AQUIN AND YOLANDE VILLEMAIRE 585 structures not the 'J"rll""",'7~"" c:.v£,::/vuc. While Meurtres ablanc narrator is taken on those arcmn,a had suggeslted, rIrI;t-1JeI'SOnnarrator is as ImpIC:iu!:abJle in which she is ~.u.lV<;;::U.YkO;;:U. reader's 586 MARY JEAN GREEN as worthless and uninterestin~ not able to sustain a second reading, even to help pass the time. As they both foreground and denigrate the genre that provides the framework of their texts, the narrators of Prochain episode and Meurtres a blanc share an inability to assure the successful fulfilment of basic generic expectations. Like Aquin's narrator, Villemaire's is always losing the thread of her story - the reader's ability to follow the narrative thread being, of course, a crucial element in the popular success of any spy novel. Aquin's narrator writes: Tai perdu Ie fil de man histoire, et me void rendu au milieu d'un chapitre que je ne sais plus comment finir' (142). Villemaire's echoes: Je tournoie dans Ie vide en essayant de trouver une ligne nette, d'y voir un fil conducteur. Mais tout reste blanc; rien ne se relie' (47). Perhaps Villemaire's narrator is constantly losing the thread of her narrative because, as she has said earlier, IC'est cousu de fil bland' (27). In the end of Villemaire's story, as in Aquin's, the plots of fiction and reality merge, to end in incoherence and lack of resolution, an ending which, of course, goes against all the generic conventions. As Aquin's protagonist writes, 'A tous les evenements qui se sont deroules je cherche une fin logique, sans la trouverl' (167). And Villemaire's narrator laments at the end, 'Les donnees paralleles de cette histoire sans queue ni tete m'echappent au fil des pages au lieu de venir se ranger bien sagement dans une structure coherente. Elles vont dans taus les sens et debordent presque toujours la question' (123). One of Villemaire's protagonists even plans to imitate the characteristic Aquinian gesture of suicide, although her choice of modalities - Anacin, Aspirin, Contac C, Valium, and Coricidin - undermines her seriousness of purpose, in the process engaging in subtle mockery of the ever-suicidal Aquin.In the end, the narrators of both texts see themselves as manipulated by forces beyond their control. Aquin: 'Je sais que chaque fois que je cede au desenchantement, je continue de lui oheir [a H. de Heutz] et de me conformer au plan demoniaque qu'il a ourdi contre moil (171). Villemaire: 'mais j'aimerais bien savoir qui au quoi nous a ainsi manipulees' (116). Aquin's narrator even loses the sense of being in control of the book he is writing: IJe n/ecris pas, je suis ecrit' (89). What he means is that his actions are shaped by the historical situation in which he finds himself: 'on dirait que man passe anterieur a trace man cheminement et profere les paroles que je crois inventer' (90). In Villernaire's work this dilemma is taken literally, as each protagonist, the original narrator Marie and the supposedly fictional Caroline, is revealed to be the creature of the other's writing in a final duel for control of authorship, although each, it is suggested, may be in the hands of a higher power. The constant undermining of the credibility of the plot structures of the spy novel is even more pronounced in Villemaire's text, which presents itself, as I have tried to show, as an overt parody of Aquin's. By her HUBERT AQUIN AND YOLANDE VILLEMAlRE 587 repeated mirroring of the structures and phrases of Aquin's text, Villemaire is undertaking the parody of a parody, a ludic gesture that may be the sign of a collapse into utter insignificance, which, as her own text suggests, is a potential consequence of attempts at subversive rewriting. This may have been the dominant reaction to Villelnaire's text on the part of its readers because it has attracted surprisingly little critical commentary in comparison with the serious attention accorded to her second novel, the eminently postmodern La Vie en prose. It may be that Meurtres ablanc is, as its title suggests, a self-deconstructing work, the blanks of the title effectively neutralizing the reality of the murders. Villemaire's text, at first reading, seems to lack any seriousness whatsoever . It is perhaps, as is suggested near the end, merely a game of Clue, in which the endlessly interchangeable elements produce different solutions each time but lack any transcendent meaning. Or, as the cover of its 1986 re-edition suggests, it may simply be a Jroman policier pour rire.' But Villemaire indicates that there may be a meaning in this act of reinscription. Early in the text her secret-agent protagonist suggests that her mission consists in just such rewriting. Using her 'cover' as a temporary secretary employed by JOffice Overload,' Marie has recently foiled a Japanese double agent by literally rewriting his text as she moves between French and Japanese versions, reworking a batch of top-secret documents Wltil they become 'totalement insignifiants' (16). As Villemaire herself is doing in her own rewriting of Hubert Aquin, her secret agent/ secretary is neutralizing important information, as she says Jneutraliser I'effet explosif de ces renseignements a notre sujet.' In her job of secretarial subversion, she removes such information from the text and replaces it with stock plots drawn from popular culture - 'Le Petit Poucet, Cendrillon, La Belle au bois dormant et autres sornettes' (16). Hidden under the 'cover' of the dedicated secretary, her subversive activity goes unnoticed, her employer having been dazzled by her typing skills. Finding that her repertory of known texts includes only Perrault and some popular songs, she begins herself to invent stories and play with words, undertaking an activity that leads her to begin to write her own material between missions. The project in which Villemaire's narrator is engaged is pre-eminently that of the writer, who is always, inevitably in some views, engaged in the rewriting of other texts. It thus comes as no surprise that the fictional character she creates, Caroline, is herself enmeshed in a stock plot, living a spy novel embellished by even more cliched fantasies of oriental seduction and abduction. If it is in the process of rewriting that Villemaire's protagonist accomplishes her mission, it is the nature of Villemaire's own rewriting of Aquin's text and the whole secret agent literature on which it is based that must hold our attention. In his analysis of the James Bond series, Umberto Eco sees these popular novels as constituted by a series of opposing pairs, often embodied in characters, such as Bond-Villain and Woman-Bond, which are 588 MARY JEAN GREEN then arrayed as in a game: 'The novel, given the rules of combination of oppositional couples, is fixed as a sequence of Nmoves" inspired by the code and constituted according to a perfectly prearranged scheme.,6 Eco then goes on to list a series of nine 'moves,' which he sees as present, in varying order, in every novel in the Bond series. Although Fran~oise Maccabee-IqbaF has found that Aquin made little use of the many conventions of the detective novel, all of the elements listed by Eco as necessary to the Bond novels are present in Prochain episode, with the exception of the last two: 'Bond beats villain (kills him, or kills his representative or helps at their killing)'; and 'Bond, convalescing, enjoys Woman, whom he then loses....'s It is precisely the failure of Aquin's protagonist to make these final moves that defines his situation. Mordecai Richler, in his own analysis of the Bond novels, comes up with a list of six essential elements, and again Aquin could be said to incorporate all but the last two.9 . In his close adherence to the conventions of the spy novel, Aquin implicitly raises the question of his own attraction to the genre. Although primarily anglophone, the tradition of espionage had been fully appropriated within Quebec, in the wartime and postwar adventures of the francophone Canadian agent IXE-13 and his little band of devoted associates, stories that have been collected and analysed by the Laval University team of Paralique.lO Hubert Aquin admitted his own childhood fascination with the IXE-13 series, and he even starred in a film parody by Jacques Godbout produced by the National Film Board, scenes from which are reproduced in Godbout's documentary on Aquin, Deux episodes dans la vie d'Hubert Aquin. Aquin's attraction to IXE-13 is worthy of note, because the intrepid Canadian spy, with his legendary physical and verbal agility, accompanied by a devoted fiancee who is also his clever associate, bears little resemblance to the confused and powerless spies who follow their solitary path in Aquin's own work. In his Anatomy of the Spy Thriller, Bruce Merry sees the genre as a modern-day version of the classical epic, and, expanding Erving Goffman's view of the spy novel as a 'vicarious adventure ritual/ sees the genre as meeting a need for heroism unsatisfied in contemporary culture: 'the epic quest, the magic mission, the fairy-tale encounter and the . espionage assignment, appeal to the larger-than-life fantasy needs of the' plebeian audience and the imagination of popular readership in every age. The spy thriller caters to the same need in urbanised, technologyconscious modern man.'ll Cawelti and Rosenberg, for their part, see the growth of the genre as closely related to the Western, the novel of frontier adventure. As brilliantly pioneered by writers like James Buchan in The Thirty-Nine Steps, the early twentieth-century spy novel, in their view, is a form of romantic adventure, pitting a heroic individual against a sinister organization. As they go on to suggest, this form permitted a staging of HUBERT AQUIN AND YOLANDE VILLEMAIRE 589 conflicts between the individual and society that are at the centre of modern culture. The pulp adventures of IXE-13 were certainly a latter- ' day version of this subgenre, as were the postwar adventures of James Bond, and it is clearly the Bond version of the spy novel that Aquin has chosen to parody and deconstruct, not only because of its familiarity to his readers but perhaps because of his grave doubts about the possibilities of individual or collective action in the historical situation of Quebec, a question he had already explored in his essay 'L'art de la defaite.1l2 Eco has shown that the Bond novels axe based on a series of oppositions , embodied in recognizable stereotypes and turning around the confrontation of hero and villain, which corresponds to a fundamental opposition between good and evil. This opposition is embodied in characters who incarnate the values of 'our own' culture (in Bond's case, traditional British values) as against characters who are unmistakably 'other' - foreign, dark, and generally physically repulsive.13 Mordecai Richler has told us how John Buchan's descriptions of his villains, which, like Bond's, correspond to stereotypes of a foreign-born Jew, made him as a child cast a glance of suspicion on his own grandfather.t4 This opposition between 'us' and 'them' is, of course, fundamental to the genre from its beginnings and is, I would suggest, a key element in distinguishing the secret agent from the detective hero, with whOln he otherwise shares many characteristics (my use of the masculine pronoun here is intentional, as I shall go on to explain). With its focus on national and ethnic differences, its concern for preserving cultural identity, the spy novel form presented itself as clearly related to many of Aquin's most pressing concerns. It is ironic - and Aquin was perhaps not unaware of this - that the values upheld by James Bond, a clear target of Aquin's parody, are precisely those British traditions from which Aquin's Quebec is trying to break free. The entrapment of Aquin's protagonist in a traditionally British form may already suggest his fate, even though the subversive effect of Aquin's own deconstructive writing is breaking down the structures that have held it together for so long. His this fundamental opposition between good and evil, between Hero and Villain, that Aquin's novel seeks to undo as his spy hero, in the situation characteristic of the Bond genre, confronts his adversary. Instead of the implacable adversary he had dreamed of subduing - Carl von Ryndt, banker for the opposition, or even H. de Heutz, historian of Scipio the African - Aquin's hero finds himself dealing with Jean-Marc de Saugy, whose francophone name already suggests a bond with himself, and who reveals himself to be a mirror of the protagonist's own depressive state, to the point of adopting as his own the story of abandomnent of wife and family the hero has previously told him. But as the opponent reveals his tendency to become another mirror for the hero, his own female associate K shows dangerous signs of betrayal, as she is seen 590 MARY JEAN GREEN lurking in the vicinity of the adversary's chateau and he is heard arranging rendez-vous with her on the phone. The game of mirrors that is Aquin's text seems, as critics have repeatedly said, to reflect the situation of contemporary man. I might add that the man it reflects is always the same: hero collapses into narrator, who in turn reflects the author. Even the adversary gains entry into this depressive brotherhood. In fact, the only character who is excluded from this series of reflecting mirrors is the woman, the mysterious blonde K, who, herself without a story by means of which she might gain entry into the masculine circle, moves further from the narrator's grasp. The universe of collapsing oppositions and increasing double agency that Aquin has reconstructed as he deconstructs the simple values that govern the novels of James Bond are not without their relevance to the world of historical reality, as Aquin's critics have observed. Patricia Smart, for example, comments in Hubert Aquin, agent double, speaking of Aquin's first two novels: lOans leurs miroirs nous voyons refieter les symptomes de notre alienation: notre recherche d'absolus faute de vraiment posseder notre vie; notre tendance apasser de role en role sans jamais nous demander quel visage se dissimule derriere la serie de nos masques; notre passivite, et meme notre connivence, avec ceux qui nous "violent." '15 This new perception of a perpetually unstable reality that defies the individual's attempts at comprehension has, in fact, not been lost on the spy novel itself. Even as Aquin was putting a postmodem spin on the adventures of a French-Canadian James Bond, works by John Ie Carre and, later, Len Deighton staged the situation of helpless individuals caught in a web of incomprehensible bureaucracies. In the work of Ie Carre, whose Spy Who Came In from the Cold is generally said to inaugurate the new genre, spies found themselves fighting not a foreign conspiracy but betrayal at the hands of their own organization. The spies of Ie Carre and Deighton inhabit a world in which collective loyalties have lost their meaning, where the line between 'us' and 'them' has become blurred. Cut off from their own people, they wander in a dangerous no man's land in which double agency is the expected norm, where any contact may prove fatal. The situations evoked in the popular spy novel of the 1960s and beyond have much in common with the protagonists of Aquin and Villemaire. Even Ian Fleming, with his characteristic tongue-in-cheek stance, was writing a parody of the simple struggle between good and evil that had formed the substance of spy fiction written before and during the Second World War. By inscribing the adventures of his protagonist in the framework of James Bond, Aquin is, in a sense, writing a parody of a parody. In taking this parodic process one step further, Villemaire begins to undermine oppositional structures left untouched by Aquin. Spy narratives are played out on the stage of international politics, and, as Eca HUBERT AQUIN AND YOLANDE VlLLEMAIRE 591 has shown, questions of national and ethnic identity playa central role in shaping the response of the reader, even in the unreal world of James Bond. Aquin's characters and settings continue to play on geographical and cultural boundaries, stressing the specificity of names and places even as oppositional categories are questioned and broken down. The settings of Prochain episode, in both Switzerland and Quebec, are invested with historical significance and symbolic meaning. Aquin is clearly playing with words, symbols, and structures, but his play is not without meaning and purpose, as he uses the mechanisms of the spy novel to explore the failure of revolutionary action in a particular historical context. Events in his text commonly take place at a crucial point in history, as stated by his well-known opening words: 'Entre Ie 26 juillet 1960 et Ie 4 aout 1792, ami-chemin entre deux liberations [...J' (19). The Swiss landscape in which the protagonist circulates is layered with literary and historical meaning, evoking thoughts of Byron, Balzac, Julius Caesar, or Benjamin Constant at every turn in the road. Aqilln's brief but repeated evocations of the topography of Quebec are equally fraught with meaning , evoking the failed rebellion of 1837-8, as the protagonist aspires to go from PapineauviUe to La Nation, with a stop at Saint-Eustache. As Aquin's protagonist suggests, 'Rien n'empeche Ie deprirne politique de conierer une coloration esthetique acette secretion verbeuse; rien ne lui interdit de transferer sur cette CEuvre improvisee la signification dont son existence se trouve depourvue et qui est absente de i'avenir de son pays' (26-7). Yet the settings privileged by Aquin are also sites of cultural interaction, which mirror the hybrid reality of the French Canadian - and this is Aquin's preferred term, in contrast to the non-hybridized term 'Quebecois .' Although French Canadians in Prochain episode gather ·to celebrate the national holiday of Saint Jean-Baptiste, they also live in places with strikingly English names, as along 'cette route solitaire qui va de SaintLiboire a Upton puis a Acton Vale, d'Acton Vale a Durham-sud, de Durham-sud aMelbourne, aRichmond, aDanville, aChenier qui s'appelait jadis Tingwick' (10). Switzerland itself has been and continues to be a site of conflict and coexistence of cultures, for Romans and Helvetians as well as present-day French, Germans, and Italians. And Aquin's multiform adversary reflects the ambivalent nature of his supposedly Belgian origin, sometimes presenting himself as the Walloon H. de Heutz, at others transforming himself into the Flemish Jean-Fran<;ois de Saugy. In Prochain episode, cultural differences are not presented as immutable and unchanging but always exist in dynamic interplay.11i In Villemaire's novet national and cultural differences are not simply questioned; they become a subject of ridicule and finally lose their significance. As in Aquin's story, the travels of Villemaire's two secret agents trace a 'cerc1e infernal,' although around Morocco and Quebec 592 MARY JEAN GREEN rather than Switzerland; like Aquin's her dual protagonists end their story in a Sherbrook Street apartment. Caroline, in Morocco, repeats the typical tourist route that runs from Tangier to Tetouan to Marrakech and back, in what even her inventor refers to as a 'decor de carton-pate' (26). When she is abducted by Arab warriors, she describes them as 'sortis tout droit des Mille et Une Nuits' (47). The fictional Morocco is a country of souks, snake-charmers, drug traffic, and mysterious djellaba-c1ad men, a fiction created for the benefit of the multinational tourists everywhere present. And Carline's precious necklace, which for a time becomes an object of her search, is exposed, in the end, as one in a series of endless replications . Caroline's Moroccan travels, in their falsely exotic setting, mirror the trajectory of her sister's odyssey through an equally fake Quebec. As the narrator Marie spends her time on the run from one tourist hotel to another, Quebec itself becomes a tourist cliche: she expects to find the end of her quest in such locales as Perce or Sainte-AlUle de Beaupre, and even she complains when the rendez-vous with her contact is scheduled to take place on the Quebec-Levis ferry, which she condemns as 'un lieu de rencontre achalande, quasi-folklorique, presque un cliche' (23). Unlike Aquin's settings, Villemaire's Quebec City, a city rich in historical and cultural meanings, possesses few distinguishing marks beyond the tourist views of the Chateau Frontenac, and her narrator/protagonist moves easily into the neighbouring world of New England without registering significant change. Villemaire, however, in contrast to Aquin, effects a geographical expansion of the heroine's reality, to include not only Quebec City, Chicoutimi, and Montreal but Toronto, Provincetown, Burlington, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire (setting for a major episode, which is probably one of the few significant scenes in a novel in any language to take place in New Hampshire's pleasant but unremarkable capital city). Like the typical protagonist of contemporary spy literature, Villemaire's secret agent moves easily from one location to another, feeling equally homeless in each seedy hotel she inhabits, constantly threatened by the same mysterious forces. Moving from Aquin's nationalistic 1960s, Villemaire's text takes us into the North American culture of the 1970s. Like the elements in her plots, Villemaire's settings seem to be interchangeable cliches produced and reproduced by contemporary mass culture. As the problem in Prochain episode was how to deal with the survival of Quebec's cultural identity, the problem in Meurtres ablanc is survival in an undifferentiated and increasingly violent modern world. It may not be going too far to suggest that, in placing a picturepostcard Quebec against a Morocco that is explicitly presented as a fictional construct, Villemaire is questioning or at least poking fun at the sacred cows of cultural difference, a concept essential to the Quebec nationalism of the 1960s. As she does in all her work, Villemaire situates HUBERT AQUIN AND YOLANDE VILLEMAIRE 593 Quebec reality in a broader North American context, a perspective that will become a commonplace of Quebec literature in the post-referendum 1980s. And it thus becomes significant that she has chosen as the primary intertext for this novel Aquin's Prochain episode, an icon for a certain form of radical Quebec cultural assertion. But national and cultural differences are not the only constituent elements of the spy novel tradition called into question by Villemaire. Seldom discussed by theorists, yet seemingly fundamental to the construction of the espionage genre is the question of gender. Originating in a .tradition of masculine adventure stories, the spy novel has always had a system of gender-coded roles, a convention that has remained largely unchanged in the course of a development otherwise sensitive to political and cultural change. The roles of women in the spy novel even today remain circumscribed by sexual stereotypes, and this must provide an explanation for the fact that few women have ventured into the genre. Among the serious spy writers mentioned by Cawelti and Rosenberg, the only woman author is Helen MacInnes, and I agree with their judgment that she has not been one of the genre's major innovators, rather choosing to insert her female protagonists in the tradition of the amateur 'gentleman spy' established by The Thirty-Nine Steps and developed by Eric Ambler. Women, as Cawelti and Rosenberg remind us, have had a long history as professional agents, tracing their ancestry to Delilah and continuing through Mata Hari.17 Even contemporary spy fiction continues to rely on this tradition of woman as seductive double agent, including the only example of which I am aware in which a major spy novelist has made a woman his protagonist, John Ie Carre's The Little Drummer Girl. In her groundbreaking article on this work, Brenda Silver discusses the way in which, even in this text in which he offers an innovative focus on the woman's role, Ie Carre has reproduced traditional patterns of mediated desire.18 Len Deighton's recent casting of his protagonist's intelligent, professionally successful wife Fiona in the role of double agent, although all for the right cause, raises a number of interesting and rather disturbing questions. As Eco shows in his study of James Bond, the relationship of Bond to the Woman' is as important an axis of conflict as his relationship to the Enemy, although much more ambivalent.19 And, of course, there is Aquin's perfidious K, a character who raises unsettling questions not only about Aquin's attitude towards women, on which a certain amount has already been written, but about his attitude towards the people of Quebec, whom K has been assumed to represent. While Aquin transforms the traditional oppositions of the spy novel into an infinite series of mirrors, it is the feminine, commonly won over to the value system of the hero in the James Bond series, whom Aquin's novel relegates to the margins. Although hers is not the corpse buried in the cellar upon which the entire patriarchal system of writing is founded, 594 MARY JEAN GREEN which Patricia Smart in Ecrire dans la maison du pere20 finds in other of Aquin's novels, the woman in Prochain episode is the only character left in the role of enigmatic, faintly menacing Other. In making her woman protagonist a professional, although nonseductive 'secret agent,' Villemaire is flying in the face of traditional representations of women in the genre, re-enacting the transition that has taken place in the related genre of the detective novel from Agatha Christie to contemporary writers like Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky. In fact, Villemaire questions the oppositional nature of gender identities throughout her narrative, as men dress in women's clothes, and, especially in the supportive ahnosphere of Provincetown, shift sexual identities . As spy narratives have traditionally represented other important tensions in modern society, Villemaire's text contests the ways in which gender has been constructed and foregrounds issues of women's role in contemporary society: As I have indicated earlier, Villemaire' tak~s great care to assure her readers that all in her text is fiction, but her constant reminders of the fictional status of her text seem oddly over-emphasized. It is at the end of the novel, when the so-called 'fictional' character begins to make pretensions to authorship and when the 'fictional' murderer 'Abdul' bursts out of his story and into the narrator's world, that we begin to question the status of reality and fiction in Villernaire's text. Indeed, the opposition between fiction and reality reveals itself as the structuring principle of the novel. Aquin's text, too, had tried to resolve the problem of art and action and perhaps, as Smart suggests in Hubert Aquin, agent double, to perceive a possible relationship between the two. For Anthony Purdy, Procltain episode is Ian explicit exploration of the problematic relationship between the logic of life and the logic of story.'21 Villemaire may well be questioning the relationship between fictional representations and the lives of real WOlnen. Her protagonist yearns for a James Bond to take her in his arms, as the Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties of whom she writes are rescued by their Prince Charmings, but Villemaire's narrator must fend for herself, as the two men who try to help her are eliminated as quickly as they appear. If Aquin's hero drives a sleek European Volvo at breakneck speed, Villemaire's drives her own old pink vw, whose colour she describes as 'rose nanane,' and runs out of gas on the highway. If Aquin's narrator frequents the best hotels and restaurants in his guise as a secret agent, Villernaire's work as an office temp limits her choices to the lowliest of roadside motels. For all the papier-mache settings and tourist cliches, the world in which Villemaire's heroines lead their lives is all too familiar, and the dangers they face are far too real. In the real world, as in Villemaire 's text, newspapers are filled with brutal and senseless murders, HUBERT AQUIN AND YOLANDE VILLEMAIRE 595 modern women. "'...r."'''''........ the street. Women are victims down in the truck is lI'''U.LU.L'"o:;;. to meet someone in a cafe. and once underCUl ~rel1CV in the of While narrator has a clear T'\l1l"1"\r'