An intimate death marie claire blais biography

  • Marie-Claire Blais, a novelist whose long, elliptical sentences and incisive explorations of human consciousness won her comparisons with Virginia Woolf.
  • Marie-Claire Blais, a French Canadian author who found wide acclaim with her brutally violent, verbally exuberant novels about suffering, rebellion, intimacy.
  • With considerable subtlety, Marie-Claire Biais uses the fraudulent Romaine.

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    I. The Unpublished Notebooks of Marie-Claire Blais as a Pre-Text (“avant-texte”3) to her Short Story “The Torment”

    1The focus of this study is to explore the relationships that exist between Marie-Claire Blais’s different literary genres in the development and continuity of certain themes such as deterritorialization, American and European politics (the Vietnam War/World War II) and the transatlantic literary venture that she engages in through an intricate exploitation of intertexts from France, Italy and England. Through a close reading of Blais’s unpublished Notebooks (1965-1967), her novel David Sterne (1967), and her short story “The Torment” (1988),1 we will analyse the close genetic relationship which exists between these various unpublished and published texts. This study will attempt to document Blais’s own experience of deterritorialization (the Québécois writer moving to the US) and her strong reactions to the political realities of two devastating wars: the Vietn

  • an intimate death marie claire blais biography

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    Deaf to the City

    October 12, 2011
    This is one of my favorite novels. I believe it to be one of the finest novels on my shelves. It's a novel written in prose as dense as the old streets and alleys of Montreal in which it takes place. Made up of a single paragraph, it not only looks Beckettian but also carries some of his ways of seeing. To be deaf to the city is to be unsympathetic and unbending to the harsh realities of the city these characters face. The narrative is spun from the stream of consciousness of those characters. Each is dying incrementally in some way, physically or spiritually, and each is engaged in a struggle against it or are at least facing it boldly. Their lives are challenging. There is no forward movement, Gloria says, because life is reduced to endless repetition. She also calls the city an urban desert.

    However, even if its message is that dark, a novel about the failures of life set against the victory of death, even if its shape on the page looks formidab

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    Excerpts from M-C Blais’s unpublished and illustrated notebooks: Fonds Marie-Claire Blais, National Library and Archives Canada

    Ces jeunes manifestants ont vu ou ont éprouvé le malaise de grandir parmi ces images de ce qu’on appelle alors la guerre du Vietnam, bil les férocités de cette guerre leur furent quotidiennement transmises, ils ont été choqués, traumatisés par ces images […] des exécutions dans les rues… (Blais 2012, 50-51)

    Individuals who experience wars, disasters, accidents or other extreme “stressor” events seem to produce certain identifiable somatic and psycho-somatic disturbances. Aside from a myriad of physical symptoms, trauma disrupts memory, and therefore identity, in peculiar ways. (Luckhurst 1)

    1Many theorists, critics and writers (Adams, Butler, Egan, Gilmore, Heddon, Hirsch, Kadar, Lejeune, Perrault, Simonet-Tenant, Olney, Rugg, Smith, Watson, etc.) have proposed that the 20th and 21st centuries should be treated as ages of “bearing witness or testi