Tatouages by Claudine Potvin (review)

Quebecois writer, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta and member of the Société Royale du Canada, Claudine Potvin offers Tatouages, a stunning collection of twenty short stories not simply about tattoos, but more generally about marks made by life itself. The title is a metaphor for the life experience that affects a human being’s search for identity in a “société désincarnée” (47).

Potvin’s talent and knowledge as a writer and a scholar are clear from the first story, “K de Kafka ou de Kurt ou de Kébèc,” which portrays an attentive mother who is “obsessed” by the idea of “decoding” her daughter’s tattoo, a letter K. This first story opens the path to a deep reflection on several topics, such as relations to the Other, exile, memories, travels, passions, losses, body and language, all of which mark the characters’ lives. Thus, the reader travels to real cities—Buenos Aires, Montréal, Havana, New York, Paris—as well as to historical and atemporal places that recall past H(h)istories and generate the sensations and emotions of that specific dimension. This is a full dimension made of personal and universal experiences that reminds us of the complexity of existence, or, better, its absurdity, as the female protagonist of “Lieux communs” states: “Tel Sisyphe, je devrai assumer l’absurdité de mon existence. Je sors ma trousse de maquillage et m’enduis de crème antirides. Enfin, je soigne mes insomnies” (88). This elderly woman is obsessed by her appearance and incessantly seeks surgical treatment. Her tattoos are the wrinkles, symbols of the wisdom and sorrow of life, that have transformed her body into a battlefield of wounds and masks. The idea of the tattoo is accompanied by a voyeuristic desire, often sexual in nature. Additionally, synesthesias highlight the sensorial dimension of the characters’ experiences. Thus, for instance, in “L’oeil d’Eléonore,” the eponymous character, with only one eye left, can see and touch her dreamlike world and the narrator of “Bar Teca” joins the erotic hide-and-seek game looking at the characters in their “échange” and the “violence du désir qui les (nous) possède tous” (45).

Between sadomasochism and voyeurism, her female characters might be seen to mirror the personal path of the writer herself, as a woman and also an academic. The book is full of both direct and indirect intellectual references, such as to Saussure, Kristeva, Barthes and Bataille, among others. Furthermore, her characters are writers of fictions, they are fond of medieval literature (Potvin is a specialist of medieval literature) and they sometimes question the effectiveness and evidence of academic work itself. Among the punctilious and systematic epigraphs she puts at the beginning of each story, the one introducing “Léanne à l’école” overtly states: “‘Let’s face it, graduate theses don’t have much to offer, percentage-wise’ (Words of a tattooist) from the work of Margo De Mello, Bodies of Inscription. A cultural history of modern tattoo community” (121). The last sentence by the narrator of this story is illuminating: “Pour l’amour, je plongerais dans l’encrier, je m’adonnerais à l’art du coloriage” (124). The narrator, alter ego of the Writer, celebrates artistic creation, art for art’s sake, encouraging all to be seduced by the emotional vortex of being written while writing and, on the other hand, read while reading.

Real and symbolic tattoos are thus intermingled, blurring the barriers between reality and fiction. Thus, Tatouage is clearly a reflection on the function of literature, more specifically on the writing process itself and the intimate relations between the writer and her own tattoo, the text. As a matter of fact, Potvin uses a sensual writing that seems to proceed by impressionist touches of painting leaving a powerful sign not only in the text, but also in the reader’s mind which is, in turn, tattooed by the colors of the words he/she reads. Lexical enumeration, numeral asyndetons, synesthesias, word...