Flesh and Other Fragments of Love

Other works by Evelyne de la Chenelière

Strawberries in January

Feet of the Angels

Flesh and Other Fragments of Love
© Copyright 2014 by Linda Gaboriau

French text copyright © 2012 by Evelyne de la Chenelière. All rights reserved. Adapted from
Une vie pour deux
copyright © 1978 Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle

Playwrights Canada Press

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Cover art,
Sans titre (drawing)
, 1964, by Hans Bellmer © Estate of Hans Bellmer / SODRAC (2013)

Cover and book design by Blake Sproule

The Alegreya serif typeface used was designed by Juan Pablo del Peral. The typefaces is used under the SIL Open font license version 1.1.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Chenelière, Évelyne de la, 1975-

[Chair et autres fragments de l'amour. English]

   Flesh and other fragments of love / Evelyne De La Chenelière

; translated by Linda Gaboriau. -- First English edition.

Electronic monograph in multiple formats.

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-77091-240-3 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-77091-239-7 (pdf).--

   I. Gaboriau, Linda, translator II. Title. III. Title: Chair et

autres fragments de l'amour. English.

I. Title

PS8555.H44526C4413 2014   C841'.54   C2013-907997-1

C2013-907998-X

We acknowledge the financial support of the National Translation Program for Book Publishing for our translation activities and the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council (OAC)—an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,681 individual artists and 1,125 organizations in 216 communities across Ontario for a total of $52.8 million—the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

FOREWORD

Why adapt a novel by Marie Cardinal for the stage today?

Before speaking about Marie Cardinal's writing and more specifically about her novel,
Une vie pour deux
,
I must say that the decision to write an adaptation rather than a new play has great significance for me.

I feel the need to excavate, extract, assemble and respond, rather than to be inspired solely by my own imagination, education, culture and experiences.

This need is complex, because it has forced me to explore an approach to writing that was unfamiliar to me, an approach I've been discovering over the past few months.

Not to write a new play

Adapting a novel for the stage has led me to question many things and to take a stand.

What is the role of literature and playwriting in society today?

What does it mean to incorporate someone else's writing into one's own?

What, in the writing that I am appropriating, is familiar and what is strange to me?

Why deconstruct one story rather than create another?

Why revive Marie Cardinal?

Can writing free the dead?

For the time being, I don't want to lay claim to new ideas.

I prefer to find my subject matter in existing ideas.

Consume them, digest them, recycle them in the most noble and most humble sense of that word.

Yes, I prefer cultural recycling to cultural industry.

I have accepted my imagination's fatigue.

In adopting this approach, I am also questioning the abundance of contemporary playwriting in Québec today.

For now, I have chosen not to participate in the mad proliferation of new plays that, for the most part, will only get one production, one interpretation, one dimension.

We are living in the illusion of spontaneous generations where everyone believes that he has given birth to himself.

A reign of artists and writers who have no predecessors, no parents and a lot of originality.

Before we drown in the flood of cultural products generated by our haste and our blindness, I'm stopping.

It's a pleasure to put invention aside for a while and to concentrate on another woman's words (to say it).
*

Not the latest fashion

Marie Cardinal was obsessed by themes that challenge me.

They challenge me in part because these themes are absolutely not the latest fashion: the experience of motherhood, childhood landscapes, falling in and out of love, nostalgia, femininity, inner growth, introspection, literature. Today, violence, cruelty, disposable human relationships, the inner void and perversion are fashionable. So why adapt the work of a novelist so far from the latest fashion?

In recent years Marie Cardinal has been relegated to the purgatory where important writers land when they die. They stay there for a while before people become interested in their work again.

I am interested in this novel because I have the intuition that I can extract from it a substance that will reveal the force and the necessity of Marie Cardinal's writing.

Marie Cardinal attempted, in her work as a writer and in her lifestyle, to reinvent the couple, the family, what it means to be a woman and, more particularly, an intellectual, creative woman. I believe she wanted to set us free from definitions.

It is in part thanks to her that today I, like many others, am able to seek balance and fulfillment without resorting to sacrifice, despair, total abnegation or the negation of the individuals in my life.

That doesn't mean that Marie Cardinal achieved her goal, or me mine. It simply means that we are allowed, as individuals and as a society, to imagine that apparently contradictory and incompatible desires can coexist in a woman's life. That is huge. Perhaps May '68 in France and the Quiet Revolution in Québec did not succeed in transforming an alienating system, nor did they turn the devastating tide of unbridled capitalism, but these revolutions transformed private life forever.

It is a novel about our most private lives that I have appropriated. A novel that approaches the body as a landscape, and landscape as a body.

A kind of autopsy of romantic love.

A conversation with her

The Marie Cardinal I knew was already in the grips of the aphasia that deprived her of words and the ability to articulate her thoughts. What a cruel twist of fate for a woman of letters to be sentenced to silence.

Needless to say, I never had long conversations with Marie Cardinal and I regret that. I wish that I could have met her earlier, or that her words could have abandoned her later.

Today I am avenging that fate: I'm having a conversation with her.

La chair et autres
fragments de l'amour
was first produced in the original French at Espace Go in Montreal on April 24, 2012, in a production directed by Alice Ronfard. It featured the following cast and creative team:

Pierre: Jean-François Casabonne

Simone: Violette Chauveau

Mary: Evelyne de la Chenelière

Assistant director and stage manager: Alexandra Sutto

Set design: Gabriel Tsampalieros

Lighting: Caroline Ross

Costumes: Ginette Noiseux

Music: Simon Carpentier

Flesh and Other Fragments of Love
was first produced in English by Tarragon Theatre, Toronto. It ran from January 15 to February 16, 2014, with the following cast and creative team:

Pierre: Blair Williams

Simone: Maria del Mar

Mary: Nicole Underhay

Director: Richard Rose

Assistant director: Andrea Donaldson

Set and costume design: Karyn McCallum

Lighting design: Rebecca Picherack

Sound design: Todd Charlton

Stage management: Marinda de Beer

Assistant stage management: Marc Benson

FRAGMENTS

1. The Landscape

2. The Corpse

3. Blood and Tears

4. The Belly

5. The Fist

6. The Chest

7. The Tongue

8. The Flesh

9. The Brain

10. The Heart

CHARACTERS

Simone

Pierre

Mary

1. THE LANDSCAPE

SIMONE

(to PIERRE)
A body?

What kind of body?

Whose body?

Where?

What time?

How?

How long ago?

Hair?

Gulls?

Hands?

Eyes?

A man or a woman?

A woman, of course, a woman, I was sure of it.

Did you touch her?

Did you touch her, Pierre?

Was she beautiful, soft, white?

Are you sad, devastated, frightened, disgusted?

You don't want to tell me?

Why?

She's yours?

You don't want to share her with me?

You don't want her to bring us together?

You want her to drive us farther apart?

Do you love her?

Do you love her more than me?

Why do you love her?

Do you still love me?

Pierre?

Do you love me?

Why don't you love me more?

Pierre?

Do you want to love me more?

Even more?

Do you want to love me till death do us part?

How can you accept that death will part us?

Pierre?

Are you going to let death part us?

*

PIERRE

I was walking on the beach.

I don't know anything about the sea, the sun, the shore.

Simone comes from the Mediterranean coast, while my roots are deep in the land of northern France.

Go explore while I finish arranging everything.

SIMONE

He doesn't know anything about the sea, the sun, the shore.

I come from the Mediterranean coast, while Pierre's roots are deep in the land of northern France.

I thought our geographies would be united in Ireland.

I thought that, hand in hand, we would draw a new map together during this long vacation in Ireland.

I picked bouquets for our vacation home in Ireland,

I made tea in our vacation home in Ireland,

I washed the sheets and linens in our vacation home in Ireland,

I've almost finished arranging everything in our vacation home in Ireland,

how beautiful it's going to be, this vacation together in Ireland.

Ireland can be grey, but it's mostly green,

we can stay inside when it rains.

I called the children,

let them know we had arrived safely,

I know they don't care, but still,

they weren't home anyway.

Or they decided not to answer.

I'm not worried.

I'll call back.

I'm not worried.

They're enjoying it.

Enjoying our absence.

It's good.

To go away.

Occasionally.

We should make a bonfire on the beach,

yes, what a good idea,

when the rain stops

we'll make a fire on the beach and we'll cook some fish.

The rain has already stopped.

Go explore while I finish arranging everything.

I know you're dying to do it.

Your walking shoes are in the front hall.

You forgot them in the car.

I know you'll end up walking barefoot,

but take it easy, give your feet time to form calluses.

Be careful, the paths are steep.

You'll find the beach on your own,

you can hear the ocean from everywhere.