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.

* A reference to Marie Cardinal’s best-selling novel, Les mots pour le dire/The Words to Say It.