The Setting Lake Sun (2 page)

[1]
Comment ne pas penser à Lamartine, bien que Setting Lake soit le nom réel d'un lac  du Manitoba dont Léveillé « interprète » le sens dans la traduction volontairement  paradoxale qu'il en donne.

[2]
Cf. Alain Kervern :
Bashô et le haïku
, Paris, Bertrand-Lacoste, 1995.

[3]
Saint-Boniface, Éditions du Blé, 2003, p. 204.

[4]
Cf. Jacques Brosse :
L'Univers du zen. Histoire, spiritualité et civilisation
, Paris, Albin Michel, 2003.

[5]
Cf. Henri Maspéro :
Le Taoïsme et les religions chinoises
, Paris, Gallimard, 1971.

[6]
Op. cit., p. 205.

[7]
L'Étang du soir – les poèmes d'Ueno Takami
, J.R. Léveillé, Étienne Gaboury, Saint-Boniface, Éditions du Blé, 2008.

J.R. Léveillé's novel,
The Setting Lake Sun
, the title of which inverts a major cliché of the aesthetics of the novel 
[1]
, marks a critical point of another inversion in his fictional work. Indeed, if the representation of desire as an absolute was central to his imagination, and to his writing as a whole, his first three novellas,
Tombeau
,
La disparate
, and
Plage
(1968–1984), with their insistent reference to Georges Bataille, rested on a transgressive vision of the romantic esthetic in which desire, a figure of anguish and excess, alters the written form. Beginning in 1997, however, with
Une si simple passion
,
The Setting Lake Sun
,
Nosara
, and
New York trip
, the desiring drive, with its morbid and obsessive dimension, gives way to the reverse notion, informed by Far Eastern thought (Zen and the Tao) that mastering desire puts the subject in a direct relationship with the breath of the cosmos, making the impermanence of things the key to one's renewal. In Léveillé's work, the major figure in this transformation is the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, the inventor of the haiku, the embodiment of Zen aesthetics. 
[2]

Although there are only two direct references to the 17th century Japanese writer Basho in
New York trip
, the definition of haiku, “Japanese classical poetry. Three lines, hepatsyllabic, pentasyllabic, heptasyllabic [or seven syllables, five syllables, seven syllables]” appears in
Nosara 
[3]
. In
The Setting Lake Sun
, however, Zen, of which the haiku is the poetic expression, permeates the novel's universe through the central character, Ueno Takami. Ueno, a Japanese poet living in Manitoba, introduces the narrator to the Zen aesthetic: music, painting, philosophy. He, in particular, develops in his own life the central tenet of Zen Buddhism, the “Wabi-Sabi” mentioned at the beginning of
New York trip
: “Wabi: not too much, not too little.”  The Wabi-Sabi is the middle path adopted by the wise when achieving a sense of the impermanence of things in the endless outpouring of life. This is the feeling that haiku expresses. It is at the heart of the Zen philosophy which permeates Léveillé's work from
Une si simple passion
on. But it is in
The Setting Lake Sun
that it reaches its fullest and purest expression. 

We may recall that Zen is a derivative form of Mahayana Buddhism (Great Vehicle), which originated in China under the name of Chan and migrated to Japan as Zen 
[4]
. What characterizes Zen is Wabi-Sabi, which can be translated as the “thus-ness” of things: things are as they are, in their pure being-ness and fundamental nature of their impermanence. 

Léveillé connects Zen philosophy with another earlier Chinese philosophy, the Tao 
[5]
. Here too, there are many references to the Tao in his work and
Nosara
includes in its entirety one of the most famous pieces from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu:

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of myriad things. Thus, constantly without desire, one observes its essence. Constantly with desire, one observes its manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery. 
[6]

What is interesting in this excerpt is that the question of desire is asked. In fact, if the Tao and Zen are two distinct philosophies (and two religions), for Léveillé they converge in the practice of non-action which allows one to experience Buddhist deliverance or to follow the Way or the path (the meaning of “tao”), which is not a means of getting from one point to another, but a process of begetting the world in the dynamics of cosmic breath with which the wise should be in tune. For non-action is not a passivity born of denial, as Western belief has often held, but simply a willingness to let go of intentionality. The failure to act is emptiness in action. In Léveillé's fiction, non-action defuses the crisis of passion which was the subject of his early novels. On the contrary, desire in its Taoist form awakens an energy analogous to the universal breath in which an individual is reborn indefinitely.

The Bataillienne negativity of desire then disappears and makes way for a tensivity whose enjoyment stems from two principles found in both Zen and the Tao: the feeling of “presence” and the adherence to the infinity of being within the experience of growth so characteristic of desire.

The feeling of presence breaks with the notion of vectorial time oriented towards the future. This is the discovery that the fullness of being is manifest in the moment, that is to say, in the present. For the desiring self erases the agitation related to future uncertainties (jealousy) or the absence of the beloved (the fear of loss). Desire that obeys the law of the moment transforms the torment of passion into the enjoyment of an eternal present. In this reversal of the idea of linear duration of successive moments, desire is simply part of the “thus-ness” of things ...

The feeling of expansion, in turn, transforms the tensivity of desire in communion with the being. Delivered from the turbulence of desire, the subject participates in the effervescence of the moment: from erotic delight to the pleasure of being in the proximity of the most “simple” objects. 

This experience of desire, as a means of access to the universal outpouring of impermanence of things, is essential in
The Setting Lake Sun
. It is in this novel that the Zen perspective is the most developed through the juxtaposition of Eastern wisdom (Ueno) and the wisdom of the “prairie” with its endless space and infinite horizon (Angèle). This is also the novel in which the presence of Manitoba is most acute, as both grounded territory and open horizon. Through Ueno, Angèle is brought closer to the original simplicity of things in the snowy landscape of Thompson, while Ueno recognizes the Zen spirit of haiku in a Chippewan song, transcribed in calligraphy for him by Angèle, where not only the form but the traditional patterns of Japanese poetry can be found in the song of the plains Indians:

The waters are calm

The fog rises

Sometimes

I appear.

In fact, if the Zen adventure implies a deterritorialization, which manifests itself geographically in most of his work, from
Nosara
to
New York trip
, the originality of a novel like
The Setting Lake Sun
, lies in Léveillé's decision to situate the awakening to a more diffuse, rhizomic understanding of being, one in which desire incarnates the energy of the diverse, in the place from which the subject comes. Thus, paradoxically, it is the familiarity of Manitoba that makes it possible to test the principle of otherness against the mimetic and restrictive forms of root-based identity.

For it is in
The Setting Lake Sun
that the question of identity, linked to the question of desire, gets its most radical response. Angèle, the narrator, is Métis, a little ashamed of her origins. Having been educated at Sacré Cœur school, in a small francophone neighbourhood in Winnipeg, she speaks no Mitchif. She carries within her traces of both her identities: a way of walking, a dreaminess, a particular way of laughing, and an inate groundedness. These traits, mixed with her French culture, give her the totemic beauty that inspires the artist Aron and that will attract the Japanese poet and painter Ueno Takami. This strong attraction to an otherness, in the very heart of Manitoba, is mutual. With Zen painter and Taoist poet Ueno, Angèle rediscovers the original breath of the world, the energy that is also the root of Aboriginal wisdom. She clings to this breath in her desire for Ueno, and the doubly-mixed child born of their union reconciles the diverse and the original, in a pluralistic idea of identity, consistent with Taoist teaching.

But for Léveillé, desire remains above all a narrative adventure, which, beyond fictional characters, creates forms of writing.

Thus, with the reversal of desire from principle of conflict to principle of harmony, the metaphor shifts towards the openness of the prairies in relation to the sense of expansion with which the energy of Eros infuses the body of the subject. Not only does the agenda become one of a narrative construction opposed to instability and the Brownian motion of his earlier work, but the horizontal quality of the landscape, articulates, in its avenues of escape, a tensivity that places desire in direct relationship with the very breath of the Tao. It is this primordial breath that Ueno, through the mastery of the stroke, attempts to reproduce when he draws with a brush in the traditional Chinese manner:

He explained that when you reach the perfect speed, 

there is no time. You enter the infinite.

And the snow around Setting Lake, through which Ueno and Angèle take long walks, becomes the very representation of this aesthetic for which the stroke of the brush merely highlights the white of the original emptiness. It is the whole point of the narrative work, the calming of desire against the torment of passion, expressed in images of the Manitoba landscape. Prairie and lake in their elasticity draw a possible agreement between the desiring subject and the breath of the Tao, which ensures the harmony of being, between the impermanence of things and the founding emptiness.

But the landscape also affects the shape of the story, and if the first novels, whose variability of form – narrative or stylistic -- reveal the obsessiveness of desire in an avant-garde aesthetic close to that of the New Novel, from
Une si simple passion
onwards, the device is lighter and the principle of linearity that renders the double figure of horizontality and expansion is asserted in a Zen aesthetic of desire that recalls a postmodern form of writing.

Here again,
The Setting Lake Sun
marks a special moment in Léveillé's narrative practice, with its search for a model manifested as much by the unambiguity of an internal focus as by the linear quality of the narrative, in itself a return to readability. The style is stripped-down and the diction achieves a quasi-oral simplicity as it alternates between the internal speech of the narrator, the subject of desire, and the reportage effect of narrative discourse.

The Setting Lake Sun
thus marks a high point in J.R. Léveillé's novel oeuvre, not only by reversing the question of desire arising from the Zen experience, but also shifting from 'experimental' writing to an aesthetic of openness. It is for this reason that the metaphor of roots, the landscape in which identity is anchored, caught in the interplay of otherness, signals the post-modern detour of a writing whose metafictional dimension is expressed in the eponymous book:
L'Étang du soir
. Using a title which goes one step further, J.R. Léveillé published “The Poems of Ueno Takami” in haiku form, poetically intensifying the Zen universe of the novel:

small flowers

small flowers

I've already said too much
[7]

Marc Gontard 

Professor of Literature 

President, Université Rennes 2 

[1]
How not to think of Lamartine, although Setting Lake is an actual Manitoba lake whose name  Léveillé “interprets” in his deliberately paradoxical translation.

[2]
See Alain Kervern,
Basho and haiku
, Paris: Bertrand-Lacoste, 1995.

[3]
 Saint-Boniface, Éditions du Blé, 2003, p. 204. 

[4]
 Cf. Jacques Brosse,
L'Univers du zen. Histoire, spiritualité et civilisation
, Paris : Albin Michel, 2003. 

[5]
 Cf. Henri Maspéro,  L
e Taoïsme et les religions chinoises
, Paris : Gallimard, 1971. 

[6]
  Op. cit., p. 205. 

[7]
L'Étang du soir – les poèmes d'Ueno Takami
, J.R. Léveillé, Étienne Gaboury, Saint-Boniface, Éditions du Blé, 2008.