[In the following review, Andersen discusses the feminist aims of Brossard's French Kiss and Lovhers.]

Nicole Brossard is one of the leading writers of Quebec. From a feminist literary viewpoint she is probably the most important one: she is an innovative writer who is also a radical feminist. Questioning established cultural patterns and systems, her texts—prose, poetry, theory and often a mélange of the three—have since the seventies been showing Quebec writers the way to modernity. Brossard's writing is literary theory as well as political statement; it promotes and uses almost exclusively women's images, symbols, language and experiences. Her aim is to place woman in the center—of society, culture and politics.

Brossard has written more than twenty books since 1965. Several have already been translated; now, these two recent and excellent translations, and a forthcoming translation of La lettre aérienne, to be published by the Toronto Women's Press, will help anglophone readers make the more thorough acquaintance of this avant-garde feminist from Quebec.

In Brossard's poetic prose, writing perpetually resists two elements which threaten, like parasites, to invade the text. One is reality, whether dull or exciting, the other is traditional fiction with its plots, its intriguing characters and/or objects. From the struggle against these tempters, which takes place within each sentence, emerges the text: condensed and at the same time exuberant, lucid and essential, textual essence, an energizing fluid, a literary super-fuel.

While reading Nicole Brossard is invigorating, it is not easy. I had to read every book of hers three, four, five times in order to comprehend the words, the pages and their meaning, and to arrive at an understanding—which nevertheless remains very personal. For Brossard's books demand that every reader grasp in her own way, through her personal sensitivity, her individual emotion and reflection—in short, with her différence—the multispiralled work. I can only speak of my reading(s) of Brossard's prose, readings always animated by the desire to see what is not evident, to decipher the innumerable secrets of the work in which Brossard inscribes women's existence and growth.

In A Book, the first of her novels, Brossard says that "evidences are not literary matter." Her writing does not include the already seen, heard, observed, understood, said, written. Brossard demands of herself a different écriture. Differently real, differently fictive. A variant. Deviant. In French Kiss, for example, she chooses "to brandish suspended meanings."

She rides astride syntax, shifts vowels, dilates syllables, breeds analogies, takes stabs at civil narrative, cuts out "trite intrigues." Her writing feeds on "zigs and zags and detours," the letters of her words fornicate before settling on the pages of her books.

Quebec history, women's history, women's lives, their loving and their thinking are the canvas onto which these texts are woven. In the case of French Kiss, which takes place in Montreal, the translator has added "occasional unobtrusive aids" which will help the reader to understand the east-west (francophone-anglophone) opposition in the city, as well as the frequent allusions to Quebec history and literature. Lovhers is a later text, written after Brossard had come to know American feminism, after she and Luce Guilbeault had made the documentary Some American Feminists in 1976. This was a time when American feminism was perceived as much more radical than Canadian, Quebec and French feminisms. Maybe it was for that reason that Lovhers takes place mainly in New York's Barbizon Hotel for Women, where

    … the girls of the Barbizon
    in the narrow beds of America
    have invented with their lips
    a vital form of power
    to stretch out side by side
    without parallel and: fusion.

In Lovhers, text is body and body is woman, writing is bending over the paper and the "lovher" and begins with the declaration of love, is love. Brossard's texts exalt women and their creative powers. She joyously overturns such negative symbols as the castrating abyss, the devouring mother, woman as sinner. In her writing we see a euphemization of the female body, of belly, vulva, breasts and lips. Her women are intelligent, playful, productive, imaginative, creative all at once. They are women of skin and thought (peau et pensée), of their own will and voluptuousness (volonté et volupté), women no longer isolated, ignorant, ignored, lobotomized by patriarchy. They are free, free to create a network of women strengthened by a common drive, a common desire to reinvent the world. A utopian desire, yes, but one that generates pleasure, certitude, hope, thought, dream and emotion. Lovhers can be contrasted with that other recent Canadian novel, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which is equally visionary but icily frightening. Indeed, in The Handmaid's Tale and Lovhers, dystopia and utopia, Canadian literature has captured the polarities of women's image of the future.

French Kiss, first published in 1974, still reflects the sixties and early seventies. It tells of five individuals' attempts to live outside social constraints. Resistance fighters in the urban labyrinth of Montreal, a city which terrifies and fascinates them, Marielle, Alexander, George, Lucy and Camomille question everything in their search for "the perfect (total) usage of their bodies, viscera, epidermises." In the five years they spend together, before police intervention puts an end to their communal adventure, they achieve relative harmony: "At least we managed to communicate among ourselves all the fragments of knowledge and wisdom each of us had access to from our own enquiry and experience. We were awareness and communication."

Because of the role played by men in French Kiss, it seems less radically feminist than Lovhers. Yet it celebrates the energy of women. The narrator of the story is a woman who creates a new language, a nouvelle écriture, mixing blood and ink, life and writing, and who, above all, fits a filter into the story in order to "sift out static and clumps of cartilaginous words"—patriarchalsyntax, vocabulary, linearity—"the language-power which controls." The text she produces is like the daily bread that women have baked for so long; blackening a page is compared to toasting a slice of bread. Writing is woman's work and woman does away with the old dualism of body and mind. In the process, women meet each other: "… on Camomille's lips a kiss, rather chaste. Nibbled lips. Pain/relaxation. Pleasure, lips licked, left wet. I slip through the slot the text provides …"

Lovhers (first published in 1980 as Amantes) brings us into the center of Nicole Brossard's writing. We penetrate into the open yet secret mandala of women's existence. The title of the book announces a celebration of lesbian love and, as the combining of conventionally opposite ideas is one of the dominant features of Brossard's writing, that celebration is reflective as well as exuberant, bringing together all the polarities of female being. We read of lesbian rejoicing and rejoicing over text. For the lovhers, loving, reading and writing are simultaneous and equally important. Reading and delirium (lire et délire) are interconnected, sensual pleasure and intellectual discourse are punctuated by kisses.

The New York Barbizon Hotel for Women witnesses the lovhers' encounter, at once intellectual and sensual. Real yet vertiginously symbolic, this space is both mathematical figure and luxuriant dream in which the four lovhers invent a new beginning for women. Without shame the body moves from the private to the political; female excess rejoices in the emotional as well and as much as the cerebral.

A mandala is a circle of complex design, often enclosed by a square. It is a symbol of outer space as well as an image of the world. It is also a shrine for divine powers. In Lovhers, the Barbizon rises like a clitoris on the map of New York. (I must say I prefer the French edition of the book, not only because of the language—I myself usually write in French—but also because it is illustrated with photographs of the New York skyline, making the geometric design of the mandala more visible.) In this rectangular building Brossard assembles the circle of four lovhers, cardinal points of her intimate universe.

The sacred space of the mandala houses an exemplary figure: Woman. (How lucky we are in French to have the word femme which does not include the word "man.") The symbol by which she is represented in Lovhers is her mouth. In French Kiss mouths already ventured "blindly towards each other, allowing each to lose itself inside the other's geography." Lips gaped "like hungry traps inviting flies into the ink, there to sleep and sleep some more while I get back to the text and Camomille's lips." But in French Kiss men are still present, are still lovers. In Lovhers they do not exist. Here woman is the divinity, characterized by the mouth, a mouth which Brossard juxtaposes to the vulva.

I read Lovhers as a modern illustration of the long-forgotten, almost erased, myth of Baubo. In the myth, Baubo (who was either Persephone's or Demeter's nursemaid) managed to make Demeter smile again after the abduction of Persephone by lifting her gown and exposing her vulva. The Baubo figure was worshipped during the festivities of the thesmophoria, a women's festival which included lesbian activities. Men were excluded from this festival, one of the most important of ancient Greece. (Did you hear about it in school? I didn't.)

Far from being one of the curious obscenities of mythology, the Baubo story emphasizes the possibility of solidarity among women and celebrates women's pride. In Lovhers women exult in their reunion. They find in each other what Demeter found in Baubo's gesture: friendship, intimacy, pleasure and strength.

In this book, all activities are double. Celebration is exuberant at the same as it is thoughtful meditation. While writing, the narrator of Lovhers never stops reading other women's texts. Mouths are places for words as well as kisses, an "orgasm is like a process leading / to the integral: end of fragments / in the fertile progress of lovhers." Lovhers can conceive anything:

     woman is coming showing the tip of a breast
     as though to signal the beginning of a cycle,
     if nobody moves in this instant, everything
     can vertigo to become virtual.

Lovhers speaks of woman's journey towards the luminous center of female intimacy and inscribes in it the word "mouth" which is at once lips, tongue, language and vulva. Parole de femme, voluptuous orgasm, utopia, this is what happens in the shameless orgy in the mandala of the Barbizon where the forces of women converge. This location, this happy island, exists outside the patriarchal world. Here in the "sleep/wake" of women, the future is present, everything is open, accessible, mind and body are no longer separated, are satisfied. Harmony consists of "the voice of a thousand spectacles in us." The moon rises while a thousand women meet in the intimacy of their desire, to know pleasure and pride. Thanks to Brossard, we are finally stripped of our "shameful parts" (parties honteuses) and our feeble minds; we come into possession of our bodies, our thinking, all of our imagination, able to express ourselves without inhibition.

Is utopia dangerously unrealistic? Brossard does not think so. On the contrary, she believes that we cannot live without its challenge. According to her, men have been unable to imagine that a sisterhood of women could reinvent the world, its ideas, emotion, sexuality, creativity, play. This lack in man's imagination has, of course, marred the female imagination. Brossard asks us to accept the challenge of imagining the island of utopia as an island for women only. For those who, like me, find man's world insufferably dangerous, Brossard's utopian island can be something like a clearinghouse for the mind, maybe even a pleasure-house, a dream instead of a nightmare; fleeting, yes, but absolutely essential.