SOURCE: Moyes, Lianne. “Nothing Sacred: Nicole Brossard's Baroque at Dawn at the Limits of Lesbian Feminist Discourses of Sexuality.” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 70 (spring 2000): 28-63.

RESISTING THE BAROQUE

Although the term “Baroque” surfaces occasionally in interviews with Nicole Brossard and in her essays and fiction from the mid-1970s onward, she resisted using the term to qualify her writing until she published the novel Baroque at Dawn¹ in 1995. In an effort to understand the meanings accrued to the baroque across the discourses of Brossard's oeuvre and to discern the terms of her initial resistance to the baroque, I begin this analysis of Baroque at Dawn with a brief discussion of three earlier texts: a 1982 interview with Brossard, the 1982 fiction Picture Theory, and the 1975 essay “E Muet Mutant.” This gesture of doubling back helps to situate her use of the term within the field of Québécois literary discourse as well as within the broader field of baroque aesthetic practice. First used by late-eighteenth-century European art critics to refer to conventions and practices from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that were out of fashion and considered grotesque, the term “baroque” has come to refer in the twentieth century to conventions and practices (associated with the Baroque period) that recur throughout history (see d'Ors).² Clearly, Brossard's lesbian feminist project sits uneasily within the religious fervour of the Counter-Reformation so crucial to the Baroque period. But the Baroque was also a period of substantial cultural transformation, including radical changes in conceptions of the subject; a period preoccupied with passion, with making the material (paint, marble, language, fabric, flesh) yield to signs of emotion; a period whose overelaborated surfaces are heavy with multiple, even contradictory, significations; a period fascinated with the ecstasy of the martyr; a period given to allegory, to representations that disrupt the eternal by yoking it to the historical; and a period associated with ornament, detail, and other categories identified as feminine. In this sense, whether they resist, mobilize, or recontextualize the baroque, Brossard's texts certainly have a stake in exploring it.³

In an interview in 1982 in La Nouvelle barre du jour, Brossard mentioned Claude Gauvreau.⁴ Well known as a cosignatory of the 1948 manifesto Refus global, Gauvreau has also received attention for his engagement with the baroque, particularly in his 1952 novel Beauté baroque. According to Jacques Marchand in his study of Gauvreau's writing, the term “baroque” was used widely in the 1950s and 1960s in the sense of “uneven,” “excessive,” “unusual,” and “exaggerated.” Gauvreau considered “baroque” a work marked by the rush of life's impulses, by the erratic texture of desire (84-85).⁵ His is a twentieth-century baroque that exists through form and abstraction infused with emotion. Curiously, when Brossard spoke of Gauvreau's work in 1982, she spoke not of the baroque but of a rejection of description and figuration in favour of a vital abstraction; she also spoke of a drive to generate meaning where there seems to be only nonsense (“Entretien” [“Entretien avec Nicole Brossard sur Picture Theory”] 192-93). She associates Gauvreau with her project of recomposing letter by letter, fragment by fragment, “the woman through whom everything could happen” (Picture Theory 147).

Picking up on Brossard's reference to Gauvreau, the interviewers asked her if she would characterize Picture Theory as a baroque novel (Brossard, “Entretien” 193). She answered no and explained that precision, not the imprecision of shifting perspectives, is key to her sense of the holographic image of a woman at stake in Picture Theory (193-94). Yet the term “baroque” surfaces in Picture Theory, precisely in the context of a meditation on eyes—and their excesses—in a section entitled “Perspective”: “Claire Dérive pushes our sexes to the ultimate / encounter. Baroque eyes, clarity excessive / the pupil barely repetitive to wonder” (60). As I have argued elsewhere, this section bears the traces both of the narrator's reading of Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood and of the narrator's encounter with her lover, Claire Dérive. Through the repetition of details from Barnes's text and the accumulation of different points of view, this section frames writing/reading as an erotic activity and throws into relief the lesbian embrace that remains hidden in the whorls of Nightwood (Moyes, “Composing” 212-13). When the interviewers reminded Brossard of the baroque work of “repetition, accumulation and shifting angles of vision” in her text (Brossard, “Entretien” 194), she warned them of the danger of associating sensory phenomena of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (e.g., holography) with sensory phenomena that stem from “an entirely different practice of bodies, of the eye and therefore of the imaginary” (195).

I would agree with Brossard that Picture Theory is more a novel of clarity, light, and the integration of different angles of vision than a novel of ambiguity, shadow, and proliferating perspectives. Picture Theory emphasizes the role of lucidity in the process of women writing and in what Brossard has since described as “the projection of a mythic space freed of inferiorizing patriarchal images” (“Interview” 118). At the same time, there is in Picture Theory a certain engagement with the baroque. That Brossard played down this engagement betrays an ambivalence toward the baroque, an ambivalence that would intensify and permeate Baroque at Dawn.

If, as Brossard argued, Picture Theory is a product of the late twentieth century, Baroque at Dawn is marked by more than one period, by movement between periods. Insofar as the baroque can be understood as a recurring aesthetic or tendency—often associated with moments of cultural transformation—and not simply as a fixed historical period, it is possible to apply the term “baroque” to twentieth-century sensory phenomena (see Bertrand 17-22). Baroque at Dawn explores the contemporary shift from a culture of print media to one of electronic media, a shift as radical as that from manuscript to print culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see Guardiani 132-35; Moyes, Introduction 9-11). Picture Theory, too, is concerned with this contemporary shift. However, whereas in Picture Theory words and visuals operate in tandem to produce a coherent image of a virtual woman, in Baroque at Dawn words and visuals are locked in “fearsome combat” (35), and the virtual experience generated by wearing a visiohelmet and dataglove overwhelms rather than invigorates (171; see McPherson 89-90).

Brossard is not the only one to characterize her writing prior to Baroque at Dawn in terms other than baroque. In an article published in the same issue of La Nouvelle barre du jour as the 1982 interview discussed above, François Charron calls Brossard a “peculiarly classical writer” (75). That one set of critics asks Brossard about the baroque while another describes her work as “peculiarly classical”—in the same issue of a magazine—is symptomatic of a tension within her writing. This tension is made explicit in Baroque at Dawn in the liaison between the characters Cybil Noland, a classical figure, and La Sixtine, a figure for a Christian chapel whose ceiling frescoes anticipate the baroque. Exploring the peculiarity of Brossard's classicism in further detail, Louise Dupré identifies a contradiction in Brossard's work between the desire for unity, for the perfection of the absolute, and the practice of writing through which that desire must be achieved (149-51), a practice “rooted in time and space, in history and subjectivity, in ideology and the unconscious” (150-51). In seeking unity through fragmentation, in generating a utopian image of a woman through broken syntax and multiple perspectives (151-52), Dupré suggests, Brossard's writing “reinvents classicism” (149).⁶

Brossard's 1975 essay “E Muet Mutant” offers another context in which to explore the ambivalence in her discourse toward the baroque. In that essay, the term “baroque” describes the spoken discourse of women:

Women's speech is quickly exhausted. Supremely censored. Confined. Condemned to turn in circles, to close in on itself insofar as it doesn't become part of history, yet where history enters in by default. Speech of the detail and the insignificant (for the other). … Repetitive speech, based on the zero degree of tradition propagating itself, that's life. Baroque, rococo speech, with plenty of trimming: which expends itself in pure loss of energy that transforms nothing. Speech which contradicts itself.

(47)

Brossard's essay manifests not so much a resistance to the baroque as a feminist resistance to the way in which prevailing culture views women's speech. The essay goes on to contrast women's writing with women's speech and to suggest that writing allows women to make themselves visible, to impose their gaze and their own subjectivity within the public sphere—in short, to enter history (49, 51).

In the twenty years between the publication of “E Muet Mutant” and that of Baroque at Dawn, Brossard found ways of mobilizing the nonlinear movement, excess of form, and spending of meaning so often used to dismiss women's speech. As Caroline Bayard points out in a discussion of “E Muet Mutant,” “what initially appeared to be a disadvantage became a tool, a means to transform the very nature of creativity” (184). Both at the level of textual practice and at the level of theoretical inquiry, a text such as Picture Theory is preoccupied with the relationship between sense and nonsense: “Fiction then foils illysybility in the sense that it always insinuates something more which forces you to imagine, to double. To come back to it again” (28). Inhabited by a sibyl, the word illysybility (illisibilité or “unreadability”) suggests that there is always something to be made of the apparently illegible and that doubling back to make sense of what at first seems to be unintelligible is potentially transformative. In Baroque at Dawn, the baroque is more than the endless repetition of that which is deemed insignificant, without sense; it offers Brossard a conceptual framework in which to explore further the oscillation between sense and nonsense. In the words of the text, “baroque thought taken as a whole … hesitates between Chaos and Cosmos” (151). This movement between chaos (formlessness) and cosmos (form) structures Brossard's fictions from the mid-1970s onward.

The “sibyl” of Picture Theory's “illysybility” becomes an important character in Baroque at Dawn: Cybil Noland. Sibyls are women of equivocal yet prophetic texts, whose power lies in their capacity to decode the present and to intervene in contemporary culture even more than in their capacity to foretell the future. Throughout Brossard's 1995 novel, Cybil bears witness to the transition from a culture of books to a culture of proliferating images and information. At times in Baroque at Dawn, the oscillation between sense and nonsense takes the violent form of “speedy visuals that gobble up meaning as fast as it appears” (59). Within this context, Cybil struggles to decipher and decode, to work with signs and generate meaning, and thereby to sustain the productive tension between chaos and cosmos, sense and nonsense, so crucial for Brossard to the transformation of the cultural imaginary.

In addition to mobilizing formal elements associated with the baroque, Baroque at Dawn returns to the issue of women's speech raised by “E Muet Mutant.” Like all of Brossard's texts, Baroque at Dawn eschews the kind of anecdotal speech associated with the baroque in “E Muet Mutant.” However, more than other novels to date, Baroque at Dawn foregrounds the question of dialogue between women (see Brossard, “Energy” 57-58). Baroque at Dawn opens with a sexual encounter between two women, an encounter that gives way to a conversation. Asked by La Sixtine (the younger of the two) “whether she's in the habit of ‘taking the elevator’ with perfect strangers,” Cybil responds: “If possible yes. … In the sexual meeting of two stranger-women there's a temporal break that allows abstraction of the background baggage carried by each. Less of the past benefits an immediate presence” (18). The sexual energy that arises from the difference between the two women, from the fact that they are strangers to one another, is arguably the source of this extraordinary conversation. Insofar as the latter conversation is published, it locates the words of these women in history and allows their energy to transform the public sphere.

The exchange between Cybil and La Sixtine invites reflection about why, to borrow the words of Lynne Huffer in conversation with Brossard in 1993, it is so difficult “for women playwrights to create dialogue between women outside of the mother-daughter relationship,” why, “Most of the time, female characters interact through monologues” (“Interview” 119). Brossard's tentative response, “Is it because of a feminist ethic that won't allow for power relations or hierarchical roles among women?” (119), is suggestive for my reading of Baroque at Dawn; the response troubles the notion that relations among women are always, or should always be, egalitarian, a contentious issue, for example, in feminist debates about lesbian sadomasochism in the 1980s.⁷ In Brossard's novel, female characters confront, even play out, relations and roles that the discourses of lesbian feminism might otherwise dismiss. In what follows, taking my cue from Brossard's text, I examine ambiguities and contradictions within the discourses of the novel that open the possibility for further discussion and debate. What is at stake in the novel's fascination with Baroque religious art? How does the novel manipulate the slippage between the spiritual and the historical, the sacred and the profane, made available by that art? Within lesbian feminist discourses of sexuality, what remains “sacred”? In which ways do the novel's playful rereadings of the baroque—particularly the baroque's preoccupation with passion, with the ecstasy of the martyr, and with relations of domination and submission, sadism and masochism—push the limits of the latter discourses?

Whereas in “E Muet Mutant” the baroque is a descriptive term for a kind of discourse, in Baroque at Dawn it is a way of writing the ambivalence of the text's relationship to technology, violence, passion, ritualized suffering, Christianity, queer culture, S/M, and relations of power among women. Brossard's 1995 text draws on the potential in religious painting and sculpture, particularly in Baroque religious painting and sculpture, for reading the sublime and the ecstatic in terms of the homoerotic. Baroque at Dawn finds in Michelangelo's gesture of bringing pagan prophets and prophetesses (sibyls) within the sphere of a Christian chapel an important precedent for its own baroque conjunctions. Brossard's text restages his gesture as a sexual encounter between two women, Cybil and La Sixtine. Yoking together classical and Christian figures, lovers of different generations, radical lesbian feminist culture and queer culture, lesbians and pietàs, Jesuit martyrs and leathermen, Baroque at Dawn explores an erotics of incongruity. One minute, an encounter between women has the tenderness and tranquillity of a pietà; the next, it has the violence and intensity of baroque bodies clenched toward ecstasy. Each unexpected adjacency, each apparent incongruity, raises unsettling but nevertheless productive questions about lesbian feminist discourses of sexuality, about definitions, values, and attitudes that seem to be indisputable, inviolable, almost “sacred.”

WOMEN OF DIFFERENT AGES: THE COMING TOGETHER OF THE CLASSICAL AND THE CHRISTIAN

Cybil Noland and La Sixtine, Baroque at Dawn makes clear, are of different ages, different epochs. They meet in Los Angeles, the city of angels. The first night the two women take the elevator together in the Hotel Rafale (18), Cybil's lover, a woman described as “a musician and young,” insists that she is not sixteen (9). Cybil immediately christens her “La Sixtine,” the French name for the Sistine Chapel (named after Pope Sixtus IV). The chapel is mentioned in a subsequent paragraph and again later in the novel, both times in conjunction with the five sibyls of Michelangelo (another of the text's angels). The second night the two women take the elevator together, Cybil is described, this time from the perspective of La Sixtine, as “the grey-haired woman” (38). Cybil is older than La Sixtine in more ways than one. The prophetesses of antiquity, sibyls were charged with the task of making known the pronouncements of the gods. Incorporated into the Christian narrative of the Sistine Chapel paintings, these women of words and books are evidence of the Renaissance will to reconcile classical culture and Christianity, “to see all antiquity … [as] ‘preparation for the Gospel’” (O'Malley 116). Sibyls were of particular interest for this Renaissance project because they were alleged to have prophesied the coming of a Christ-like figure (116). They are of particular interest for Brossard's text because of the relative importance that Michelangelo gave them and their books within his representation of Genesis.⁸

In Brossard's novel, Michelangelo's sibyls thematize the problematics of framing, perspective, origins, and incongruity. In a chapter entitled “Sibyls and Ignudi,” Baroque at Dawn reads the Sistine Chapel paintings in some detail. The scene is a ship called The Symbol engaged in oceanographic research off the coast of Argentina. Cybil has been hired by an oceanographer named Occident des Rives to write the text of a book about the sea, a book that will include photographs by another character, Irène Mage. Padré Sinocchio, the priest aboard ship, mentions Rome, and Occident takes the opportunity to give everyone a tour of the Sistine Chapel. A figure of power, Occident speaks continuously, without pausing to hear the stories of others. Her narrative, like the narrative of Creation presented in the ceiling's central tableaux, is apparently seamless. Nevertheless, the narrator, the one who selects what to report and what not to report, finds a way to intervene; she focuses on Occident's account of the ignudi⁹ and the sibyls, the massive, three-dimensional figures that, along with the prophets, frame the two-dimensional tableaux representing various scenes from Genesis. The narrator also reminds the reader of the impact of perspective—of where one stands in the chapel and how one tells the story—on how one reads the relations between the nine central tableaux and the sibyls and ignudi. Most often, the latter are seen merely to punctuate the biblical narrative. However, the narrator intimates that, insofar as they disturb the centrality of the tableaux and draw attention to those positioned along the edges, the sibyls and ignudi play a larger role (134). From the perspective of Brossard's narrator, for whom the bare right arm of the Cumaean sybil is “as muscular as God's” (134), women of books play a key role in (the representation of) Creation.

Michelangelo's Creation narrative, the narrator observes, would not be possible today “because according to the rules of narrative you have to point at infinity with one hand and exploit it with the other” (134). This sibylline comment—in part a reference to Adam's arm outstretched toward that of God in Michelangelo's Creation of Man—has to do with myths of origins and with the way in which such myths are framed. Padré Sinocchio's impassioned response to Occident's presentation of the scenes from Genesis provides a context for reading the narrator's cryptic comment about the Infinite. Aware of the seas rising around them, he asserts that there can be no doubt about the phenomenon of the Flood: “Noah, the Ark and all that could not be merely the fruit of our imaginations” (135).¹⁰ In the French text, use of the word l'arche is particularly revealing: l'arche refers to the ark but also to the arch, the curved structure of the ceiling on which scenes from Genesis are painted; in Greek, arche means first principle, primal element, origin. Taken as a whole, the discussion of the chapel's paintings poses the problem of beginnings, of priority. In the paintings, the ignudi and pagan sibyls appear to take precedence over the Creation. They draw attention to the illusory architectural structure that supports the central tableaux rather than to the Creation narrative. By emphasizing that which lies outside the narrative of God's Creation, that which precedes the formulation of Christian myths of origins, Brossard's text raises questions about the status of the narrative and about the privileged God-man connection. If God is the Creator, then who creates the structure, the framework in which God is represented creating? How can man represent God creating man? The Infinite, the Creator, the text suggests, is a retrospective construction that lends coherence to the biblical narrative and, at the same time, primacy to man.

The image of one hand gesturing toward the Infinite while the other assumes the creative powers of the Infinite also refers to the framing devices of Baroque at Dawn. Cybil, the main character, turns out to be a narrator and perhaps even a writer of the novel; she refers in an ongoing way to writing a novel that resembles, even overlaps with, Baroque at Dawn. As character, narrator, and writer, Cybil occupies a space inside and outside the fictional frame simultaneously; she has one hand in the realm of the Infinite (writing) and another in the realm of character (the written). In this way, she is able to intervene in the process of her own creation.

In bringing Cybil and La Sixtine together, Baroque at Dawn makes a gesture not unlike that of Michelangelo's frescoes: it accommodates difference, incongruity. Brossard's novel reads the relationship between the chapel and the frescoes, specifically the sibyls, as a liaison between two women. As Alice Parker has pointed out, “names in the novel are so pointedly symbolic that the text reads in part like a fable or an allegory” (195). The sexual encounter between Cybil and La Sixtine might be read as allegorical¹¹ of erotic ties between lesbians of different generations, different discourses of desire, different modes of self-presentation, and so forth. (It is not so much that Cybil and La Sixtine stand for two identifiable groups as that their coming together makes it more possible to imagine various unexpected conjunctions.) In the context of twentieth-century lesbian literary culture, classical figures such as amazons, eumenides (furies), and sibyls are not often found between the same covers as martyrs, madonnas, and Christian chapels. In this sense, the encounter of Cybil and La Sixtine is no less dramatic than the coming together of the classical and the Christian worlds. Lesbian literature and criticism arguably privilege classical figures such as Medusa, Leda, Demeter, and Persephone over Christian figures. In fact, so important are amazons to this body of literature and criticism that Elaine Marks's 1979 notion of “lesbian intertextuality” is recast as “amazon intertextuality” in a 1993 essay by Jeffner Allen. Moreover, the ancient Greek poet Sappho, key to Marks's discussion of intertextuality, is a recurring figure in readings of early-twentieth-century writing by lesbians (see Benstock; Marcus), a body of writing to which Brossard's oeuvre has important links (see Meese; Moyes, “Composing”).

As Raymond-Jean Frontain observes in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, to date the Bible has provided far fewer inspirational figures (99). There are important reasons for this preference for the classical over the Christian, among them the greater susceptibility of figures such as amazons and Sappho to lesbian utopian and homoerotic readings (Griffin Crowder 25), the construction of women's bodies and regulation of women's sexuality within Christianity, and the difficulty that women have experienced in acceding to positions of discourse and authority within the Church. In the words of Cybil in Baroque at Dawn, “sacred books … have always endangered the lives of women” (68). In Marks's estimation, “There is no one person in or out of fiction who represents a stronger challenge to the Judeo-Christian tradition, to patriarchy and phallocentrism than the lesbian-feminist” (369). This is not to say that there are no works that draw on the Christian tradition. Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, poems such as “Immaculate, Inviolate: Como Ella,” “Holy Relics,” and “My Black Angelos” in Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, and titles such as “Passion Play” in Coming to Power (Samois), “Virgin's Request” in The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader (Pat Califia and Robin Sweeney), and “Jesus Taught Me to Bottom” in Some Women (Laura Antoniou) are a few that come to mind. However, the postures that these texts adopt in relation to Christianity—from earnest affirmation or conversion to parodic recontextualization to playful, sacrilegious eroticism—are various enough and in some cases controversial enough to thwart, or at least to slow down, efforts to map the intertextual relations.

That Brossard's 1995 text associates its turn from classical to Christian subjects with the baroque is not surprising. There is an important precedent for such an association in art historical readings of the shift in the work of Michelangelo and other male painters in the second half of the sixteenth century, the earliest phase of the period that would come to be known as the Baroque. In an essay entitled “Homosexuality in the Renaissance: Behaviour, Identity, and Artistic Expression,”¹² James M. Saslow observes that “Succumbing to the ascetic Counter Reformation, each [painter] turned from the pagan subjects forbidden by the Council of Trent toward exclusively religious imagery” (102). He goes on to suggest that, “Although Judeo-Christian myth officially offered less material for homosexual identification, many artists' treatment of religious heroes suggests a veiled or half-conscious sensitivity toward male beauty and emotion” (102). Baroque at Dawn exploits this potential in Christian iconography for homoerotic—and specifically lesbian—readings. Working with language rather than with paint, and writing as a woman, a lesbian, and a feminist at the end of the twentieth century, Brossard has a relationship with such iconography different from that of the painters whom Saslow discusses. What they share, however, is the appropriation of seemingly “inappropriate” images to open representational spaces for sensibilities and sexualities that do not have the sanction of the Church.¹³

PASSION PLAYS

What is at stake for Brossard's text in staging an encounter between the classical and the Christian? Why is Cybil, a figure for the writer of Baroque at Dawn, involved with La Sixtine, a figure for Christianity? Why does this novel attend more to angels, martyrs, and pietà than to the classical figures that typically appear in Brossard's work?¹⁴ One possible response is that Baroque at Dawn is (among other things) a meditation on women's relationship to suffering and, particularly, to images of suffering in Christianity that Cybil had known as a child in Montreal. A conversation between Cybil and “Nicole Brossard,” who is described as “a novelist she [Cybil] had met in London at a conference on autobiography” (47), hints at this possibility. Asked by Cybil why she “so often gathered her characters around a restaurant table or desk,” Brossard replies: “I don't know enough about suffering to know what's going on in people's hearts” (48). At another scene around a restaurant table, Cybil and Jasmine, another writer, worry “over the heavy cords of suffering around the world, a world tied up like Christo's packages” (60). The question of women's relationship to suffering is not a new one in Brossard's writing. In the 1983 essay “Kind Skin My Mind,” for example, Brossard writes that “The lesbian rejects mortification as a way of life. The lesbian suffers because of the mortification of women” (121). What is new in Baroque at Dawn is the engagement with Christian icons such as martyrs and pietàs. In this section, I suggest that Brossard's text reconfigures the pietà in ways that refuse the narrative of transcendence through sacrifice that subtends Christ's Passion. The latter passion, with its shades of martyrdom and suffering, is reread as ardent affection between women.

Throughout Baroque at Dawn, La Sixtine is associated with intense suffering as well as with intense pleasure. Her response to media coverage of a massacre in front of a cathedral in the former Yugoslavia, for example, is to adopt a “terribly awkward, limb-numbing pietà pose” (17), the posture of the one who bears the suffering of the world in her arms. Clinging “to a passion for life” (17; emphasis added), Cybil searches for a way of touching La Sixtine and of derailing the litany of atrocities that has overtaken her. The focus of the pietà in this scene is on death, a focus that leaves Cybil no point of intervention. Several chapters later, during a day spent with the writer Jasmine, Cybil visits a cemetery—one of many such visits in the text—and remarks on a monument depicting the Virgin and Christ. After dinner, as she drives back along the river St. Laurent to Rimouski, Cybil imagines La Sixtine coming and sitting on the end of the bed, “her back glistening with dancing drops of water” (60). She takes La Sixtine in her arms, and, “With a series of slow, deliberate movements, she [draws] La Sixtine's head against her breast so that their bodies [form] a huge pietà in the middle of the room” (60). Here the text reinterprets the pietà as an embrace. Insofar as La Sixtine (the Christ figure) is alive, this second pietà shifts the emphasis from Christ's Passion to the passion of two women. A simple identification of the two women with Christ or with the Virgin would potentially bind them to an all too familiar sainthood. An embrace, on the other hand, emphasizes relations of touch and contiguity and imagines roles other than those of the sorrowing and the sacrificed.

The two pietàs share a sculptural quality; they explore the relationship between the bodies of Cybil and La Sixtine, their postures, gestures, three dimensionality, and arrangement in space. In emphasizing the contrast between the “limb-numbing” posture of the first pietà and the movement of the second, the text effectively stages the transition from Renaissance to Baroque sculpture, from frozen image to unity in motion.

The cover image of the original French version of Baroque at Dawn¹⁵ also reinterprets the pietà as an embrace between two women, again in the context of a shift from Renaissance to Baroque aesthetic practice. The two faces that appear in the upper right corner of the text's cover are taken from a painting by Botticelli dated around 1490 entitled Pietà or, in English, Lamentation over the Dead Christ with St. Jerome, St. Paul, and St. Peter. They are the faces of Christ and an unknown woman who cradles his head (while his body lies across the knees of the Virgin in the centre of the painting). The cover image makes a number of important alterations to this detail from Botticelli's painting. In addition to inverting the faces, it crops them: that is, it cuts away the woman's halo along with the hand of the Virgin that hangs between the two faces, but it retains the luminous effect of the woman's veil and of Christ's shroud. In this way, the emphasis is on the two faces, their proximity to one another, and the rapturous elsewhere of their half-closed eyes and slightly parted lips. The cover image also alters the effects of lighting and colour. In the Botticelli painting, the lighting is general. According to convention, it falls slightly more intensely on the face and body of Christ and on the face of the Virgin. On the cover of Baroque at Dawn, the two faces emerge from semidarkness by virtue of the fairly strong light that shines on them (and on the water) as if from a direct source. This effect of tenebroso, of situating bodies in shadow and using light to give them form, to give them a fleshy quality, is more typical of Baroque painting, particularly of the painting of Caravaggio, than of the Renaissance painting of Botticelli (Wittkower 54). Certainly, the frank eroticism and the bold use of few colours—in this case, ochre, olive green, and a deep, luminous blue—are reminiscent of Caravaggio. By way of these various alterations, the cover image of the original version of Baroque at Dawn opens the possibility of reading the two faces from Botticelli's Pietà as the faces of (female) lovers.

Facial expressions are not specifically an issue in Baroque at Dawn's presentation of the two pietàs involving La Sixtine and Cybil. However, the initial encounter between the two women prompts a reflection by Cybil about the ways in which “an orgasm will recompose the lines of the mouth and chin, make the eyelids droop, dilate the pupils or keep the eyes shining” (11-12), on the ways in which a face describes “its own aura of ecstasy, beginning with the light filtering through the enigmatic slit between the eyelids when they hover half-closed halfway between life and pleasure” (12). That these words could easily serve as a description of the face of Christ in the pietà on the book's cover further opens the possibility of reading the face on the cover as that of a woman transported, not by the elsewhere of suffering, indeed death, but by the elsewhere of pleasure. Importantly, whether they focus on faces (the text's cover) or on the postures of bodies (the text), the pietàs of Baroque at Dawn displace the role of suffering in Christian narratives by reconfiguring signs of suffering (or death) as signs of erotic intensity between women.

At the same time, Brossard's text grapples with the ambiguity that resides in such a reconfiguration or resignification. What does it mean to read the faces or postures of suffering as those of pleasure? What are the ethical limits of such a reading? As Brossard points out in a 1990 essay, “There are themes that are bound to have if not an ideological at least a troubling effect: Sexuality, eroticism, homosexuality, lesbianism—something is always at stake with eroticism because it deals with limits, the moral, and the unavowable” (“Poetic Politics” 79). She goes on to explain that “A creative person has imagination and is able to process ambivalent emotion and contradictions as well as transforming anger, ecstasy, desire, pain, and so on, into social meaning” (81).

As if to test the point at which this process of transforming emotion and sensation into social meaning breaks down, Baroque at Dawn returns to the topic of a face reconfigured by a limit experience several pages after the initial encounter between Cybil and La Sixtine. As they walk in the streets of Los Angeles, the women hear shots in the distance. Pretending “that she [knows] violence and cruelty to be perennial” (30), La Sixtine mentions an old French writer (Georges Bataille) who appeared recently on television and “described the torture death of Leng-Tch'e” (30), which he had witnessed as a boy in the streets of Peking early in the century. Cybil says that she knows the pictures of this famous torture death, pictures “first published in 1923 in a psychological treatise [Georges Dumas], then again in 1961 by an author [Bataille] who gave them an erotic dimension” (30). Disturbed by the use of “ecstatic” and “erotic” (Bataille 237-39) “to portray the bewildered expression graven by extreme pain on the tortured man's face,” Cybil quickens her pace and begins “muttering words whose sense escape[s] La Sixtine” (30). This breakdown in meaning, which takes the form of too many words rather than of silence, suggests that Cybil cannot make sense of torture; she has difficulty reading the elsewhere of a face marked by pain as the elsewhere of pleasure. Her mutterings are “interrupted by the cries of a woman standing in the middle of the street waving her arms and displaying her blood-stained bosom” (30), a sign that, in the terms of the text, there is a danger in confusing violence and suffering with the erotic. The immediate concern, this scene suggests, has to be the destructive effects of this confusion in the lives of women.

Both as a character and as a writer, Cybil is distressed by representations of violence and suffering; in effect, she “suffers because of the mortification of women” (Brossard, “Kind Skin” 121). In Baroque at Dawn, Cybil's response to Bataille's reading of the tortured face as erotic (30-31) is similar to her response to La Sixtine's “terribly awkward, limb-numbing pietà pose” (17). In both cases, Cybil is overwhelmed by a profusion of words and of “media-borne” images of death and violence (17). In both scenes, she asks herself questions about “the volcano of violence erupting in cities” (15) and about her reasons for writing “this violent book” for which she has “no special gift … or vocabulary or experience” (16). That Cybil repeatedly confronts scenes of violence suggests that the reference to “this violent book” is also a reference to Baroque at Dawn. Insofar as the book is of her own construction, a book that she is in the process of writing, she cannot distance herself from its scenes of violence and suffering; she has to acknowledge a certain complicity. Sitting with her coresearchers Irène and Occident on a terrace in Buenos Aires, Cybil suddenly hears a voice that speaks to her situation: “You think keeping your distance will protect you from repeating yourself, help you understand the hidden side of your characters. Admit it you'd like to touch bottom without dirtying yourself too much” (103).

In the sections that follow, I explore “the hidden side” of Cybil's character. In particular, I consider the role that she plays in fantasies that she might otherwise condemn and the pleasure that she takes in a vocabulary of violent or extreme sexuality that she might otherwise resist. This ambivalence within Cybil is symptomatic of tensions within Brossard's text—and within feminism—between fighting violence against women, fighting ritualized suffering, and exploring discourses and practices of sexuality that have the passion and intensity of the baroque.

CYBIL'S BAROQUE HEART

An interest in Baroque religious art makes it difficult for Brossard's text to keep its hands clean. In addition to being susceptible to homoerotic rereading, such art frequently entails references to self-sacrifice and suffering. After all, martyrdom was to the Baroque what miracles were to the Renaissance (Hartt 688). Representations of martyrs and saints, designed to give individual viewers the illusion of a limit experience of the divine and thereby to heighten the emotional impact of religious art and Church architecture, played a key role in the Counter-Reformation project of intensifying individual conviction (688). Given that the same codes were used for sacred and secular works (Lucie-Smith 79), and given the preoccupation with representing the body in states of extremity, Baroque representations of martyrdom move ambiguously between the ecstatic and the erotic. As Saslow observes, “Sodoma's Saint Sebastian, bound to a tree and pierced with arrows, writhes in ostensibly religious ecstasy open to multiple personalized interpretations, from the epitome of sado-masochism to the artist's comment on his own public ‘martyrdom’” (“Homosexuality” 102).

In Baroque at Dawn, the most vivid instance of homoerotic reframing of religious ecstasy is a fantasy that Cybil constructs while in conversation with padré Sinocchio aboard The Symbol. The priest is speaking to her about the role of the Jesuits in promoting Baroque art and architecture in Argentina and is trying to impress on her the fact that she “will never know boredom” if she heeds “her baroque heart” (151). Dissociating momentarily from the conversation, Cybil wonders at which moment a priest may be said to be Jesuitical (151). She imagines the priest tied to a tree in the forests of Quebec, tormented by mosquitoes and black flies. His skin, where it comes in contact with a necklace of burning stones, blisters, “ready to burst out like an identity” (151).¹⁶ Fog envelops the martyr, and when he reappears it is “with wrists bound together and held over his head by an iron hoop” and his body “pierced everywhere” (151). In front of him stands a huge man, “partly clad in black leather” (151), who carefully calculates the pain needed to bring the man to orgasm. Chasing from her mind this image of man cultivating “his pain like an art” (151), Cybil returns to padré Sinocchio, a man depicted as “eagerly circling his god of deliverance with all imaginable baroque torments” (152). Yet, significantly, it is Cybil who has just finished conjuring up “all imaginable baroque torments”; it is her daydream or reverie.

The scene of Jesuit martyrdom from Cybil's reverie surfaces a second time in the context of a painting that Cybil dreams about seeing in Montreal's Mary Queen of the World Cathedral (172-73). The painting, The Martyrdom of the Jesuit Fathers J. de Brébeuf and G. Lalemant in the Land of the Hurons 1649,¹⁷ allows Baroque at Dawn to comment on received modes of representing Jesuits martyred at the stake.¹⁸ In her dream, Cybil takes the Jesuit in the foreground to be padré Sinocchio. She is particularly struck by the absence of signs of suffering or aggression in the painting: “Their faces show no trace of pain, hatred or cruelty. Sinocchio is intent, his gaze turned patiently toward Heaven. The Indians have the peaceful and peaceable look of people basking in the first days of spring” (173). The Jesuit, Brossard's text reminds us, bears witness to his faith in Christ by displaying forbearance in the face of extreme pain. The description of the Iroquois as “peaceful and peaceable” is more puzzling. The painting of Cybil's dream turns out to be one in a series of paintings by Georges Delfosse portraying Montreal's beginnings that Cybil has visited in the cathedral. Curiously, the Iroquois of the actual painting, with their burning pokers, pans of boiling water, and collars of red-hot axe heads, are far more aggressive than the dream suggests. In fact, Father Elie J. Auclair, in Delfosse's 1910 publication of photographs of the paintings, writes of the striking contrast between the serenity of the Jesuit and the “ferocious features of his executioners” (27). In playing down the agency and ferocity of the Iroquois, Brossard's text emphasizes two other forms of violence: first, the aestheticization of torture and suffering; and second, the construction of a founding myth of Montreal that simultaneously glorifies the trials of the Jesuits and rationalizes the spiritual conquest of the Iroquois.

Cybil's relationship to the scenes of martyrdom and sadomasochism in her dream and in her daydream is ambiguous. While Cybil takes a certain revenge upon the priest and critiques the Jesuits' cult of suffering, she is also fascinated by this cult of suffering. Toward the end of Baroque at Dawn, she explains: “I couldn't resist the urge I had to see the Delfosse paintings again. I don't know why these pictures have so long remained so deeply graven in my traveller's memory” (211). Her daydream, her dream, and her waking desire are interconnected yet somewhat contradictory manifestations of the same fantasy, something that I will return to after considering the ways in which the scenes of martyrdom and S/M are framed and the different ways in which they might be read.

Cybil's priest-turned-Jesuit-turned-leatherman is as open to, and as much a product of, multiple interpretations as Sodoma's Saint Sebastian (Saslow, “Homosexuality” 102). Reading the priest's passion for the baroque as Jesuitical, Cybil's daydream deidealizes the experience of the Jesuits, subjects the priest to torture, and details the effects of that torture in his body. Then, in yoking the Jesuit martyrdom to the leather scene, the fantasy sexualizes the passion of the priest/Jesuit. Once again, Baroque at Dawn plays with the slippage within the notion of passion between ardent affection or joyous enthusiasm and self-sacrifice or suffering. Passion, the text suggests, is a state of being subjected to or acted on by something outside oneself. The text's strategy of reading the Jesuit as a leatherman is not unlike that of reading the pietà as a lesbian embrace and not unlike reading the relationship between Michelangelo's sibyls and the Sistine Chapel as a liaison between women of different ages. In each case, the text reframes the Christian subject in homoerotic terms and demonstrates the incoherence of absolute categories such as the sacred and the profane.

Nevertheless, a reading that suggests radical continuities in the suspended subjectivities of martyr and masochist has a different status in Brossard's text from a reading that transforms a subject such as God's Creation or the Virgin lamenting the death of Christ into a liaison between women. A lesbian pietà for example, is easily integrated into lesbian feminist discourses of sexuality and, more particularly, into the network of positive associations that accrue to the arms of women in Brossard's texts (see Moyes, “Composing” 215-19). Whereas the women's embrace shifts the focus of the pietà from suffering and lamentation to bodies in pleasurable contact, the leathermen repeat the Jesuits' gesture of cultivating the art of pain; ecstasy, in the latter case, continues to be derived from and associated with suffering. Cybil's appropriation of the lesbian pietà and her rejection of the martyr-turned-leatherman says a great deal about what is safeguarded and held in high regard in lesbian feminist culture—what becomes “sacred”—and what offends.

Mary Daly's Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (1984), a text that reads scenes of Jesuit martyrdom in the context of an analysis of sadomasochistic elements in Western society, is an important intertext for Baroque at Dawn.¹⁹ Daly's text finds in written descriptions of such scenes the same message that Brossard's text finds in the paintings: “The noble christians do not fight back” (38). From Daly's perspective, “Although these descriptions of the jesuit ‘martyrs’ do not explicitly name the sexual component of asceticism, they obviously reflect the male flight from lecherous obsessions. The fanaticism both of the missionaries and of the over-zealous author of these descriptions belongs to the province of sado-hagiology” (38). In a sense, in juxtaposing the martyrs and the leathermen, Baroque at Dawn makes explicit “the sexual component of asceticism” to which Daly alludes. Just as Pure Lust takes S/M “to be essentially a phallic phenomenon, inherently directed toward the destruction of the other” (60), Brossard's text limits its representation of S/M practice to men. Daly contends that, “when women, whether heterosexual or lesbian, … proclaim themselves pro-sadomasochism, pro-pornography …, they may be exercising ‘free speech,’ but they are speaking neither as feminists nor for feminists” (66).²⁰ Brossard's text is more playful than Daly's and allows for ambivalence where Daly's does not. However, the logic that subtends Daly's analysis of the “sadosociety” and the “sadospirituality” that legitimates it (35) also subtends Cybil's reverie. Read in the light of Daly's analysis, the representation of S/M practices in the reverie is more a mechanism for denouncing Christian ritual than for homoerotically reframing it.

The negative connotations of S/M in Baroque at Dawn are reinforced by parallels between the body style of the leathermen and that of the women and men whom Cybil and La Sixtine happen upon in the streets of Los Angeles. Brossard's text associates the accoutrements of S/M—tattoos, body piercing, black leather, and shaved heads—with the grammatical tyranny of the masculine over the feminine:

Another street. Here and there, women with tattooed biceps and men with bare chests and pierced nipples strolled about in black boots, heads shaven. Equipped with a new vocabulary, they were leaving walls alone in favour of more direct statements in their own flesh. The men carried fear and danger in their bodies, arming themselves only for sexual encounters when the electricity of a single shot would emerge from their bodies with much noise.

(31)

Rather uncharacteristically, Brossard's text quickly loses sight of the women with tattooed biceps and refers to the group as men. This gesture of allowing the masculine to take precedence over the feminine—even more pronounced in French, in which “they” is gendered masculine²¹—is unexpected in light of Brossard's 1973 statement that “a grammar having as a rule: the masculine takes precedence over the feminine must be transgressed” (“Vaseline” 14). In allowing the rule to stand, Brossard's text associates the practice of marking signs in the flesh with an economy of representation that obscures women. That women might take sexual pleasure in such marking remains relatively unthinkable in the terms of the text. Furthermore, that feminist ends might be well served by queer culture, by a culture that exposes the incoherence of (and thereby destabilizes) categories such as “woman” and “man,” is also relatively unimaginable.²² Wedged between the conversation about the torture death of Leng-Tch'e (30) and a meditation on “Death” (31), the executioner, the passage cited above invites a comparison of the master of the S/M scene and the torturer/executioner. There are differences in the text's characterization of the two—notably, the difference between a man “wrapped in thought,” “calculating” pain carefully in the direction of pleasure (151), and a man who “does not count the drops of blood on his free, lonely brow” but simply kills (31). Nevertheless, the spectre of torture that appears early in the text haunts the male-male S/M scene of Cybil's fantasy.

If, as Brossard's text suggests, sadomasochism is potentially dangerous within a feminist context, then what is it doing in Cybil's fantasy? The obvious answer is that the text uses the S/M fantasy to reinforce its feminist critique of religious asceticism and ritualized suffering. The less obvious answer is that S/M is as much a part of Cybil and her feminist critique as the scenes of martyrdom that she finds “deeply graven” in her memory (211). The S/M fantasy speaks of feminism's troubled yet necessary engagement with issues of sexuality, power, and violence. It speaks, for example, of an unconscious or repressed desire for mastery, a desire to make the priest suffer, which cannot be acknowledged or acted on but which can be translated into a scene of martyrdom, even a scene of S/M, and watched. The absence of a master or torturer in Cybil's dreams of Jesuit martyrdom, an absence made more noticeable by the presence of a master in the S/M scene (and in the actual painting by Delfosse), is a symptom of this repression and, at the same time, a reminder of Cybil's role in staging the martyrdom of padré Sinocchio.

In The Language of Psycho-Analysis, J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis define fantasy as an “imaginary scene in which the subject is a protagonist, representing the fulfilment of a wish (in the last analysis, an unconscious wish) in a manner that is distorted to a greater or lesser extent by defensive processes” (314). Cybil's fantasy plays itself out at various levels: Cybil sees the martyrdom of padré Sinocchio in a daydream and reframes it as masochistic, later she dreams the martyrdom of the padré represented in a painting, and even later she feels an inexplicable urge to see the painting that figured in her dream. Drawing on the work of Teresa de Lauretis on the forms and effects of fantasy, I would situate Cybil's urge, expressed in the first person, toward the conscious end of the “fantasy spectrum” and her daydream toward the unconscious end (143-48). The daydream, the form of the fantasy that in this instance requires the most analysis, is the focus of my reading.

In Baroque at Dawn, significantly, Cybil is not a protagonist in her daydream; she disavows the scenes of martyrdom and S/M as representations of herself. What is more, she does not appear to derive pleasure from the fantasy; immediately following her reverie, she joins Irène, Occident, and the divers, “relieved to have escaped Sinocchio's enthusiasm and particularly the morbid images it has raised” (152). Nevertheless, in imagining padré Sinocchio suffering in the forests of New France and in substituting his face for that of one of the Jesuits in the painting, Cybil plays the role of master in the scene of Jesuit martyrdom. In fact, her daydream is in keeping with the priest's own suggestion that she use “her baroque heart” to free herself from boredom—in this case, the boredom of the priest's own discourse. Although Cybil does not seem to derive pleasure from her reverie, there is a certain poetic justice and a certain satisfaction generated by it. Her desire to see the painting of Jesuit martyrdom over and over again suggests as much.

One might argue that the fantasy in question is not Cybil's but the priest's, that Cybil does little more than actualize the priest's fantasy of martyrdom and then expose its “sexual component” (Daly 38). However, this reading would deny Cybil's “baroque heart,” a heart in evidence in discourses of sexuality elsewhere in the novel, and it would forget the continuities between her day dream, her dream, and her waking desires. Her fantasy cannot be reduced to a condemnation of the practices of martyrdom and S/M represented within it. The fantasy arguably plays out her (feminist) desires, albeit in oblique and distorted ways; in fact, the level of distortion or obliqueness is a measure of the danger that those desires pose for feminism. That the two scenarios present exclusively male protagonists and appear to fulfil the desires of men rather than those of Cybil is not simply a symptom of what Daly calls the “sadosociety.” Feminist anxiety about women repeating patterns of desire that oppress women²³ makes it relatively unthinkable for women to be players in Cybil's S/M fantasy. As Julia Creet points out in an article on the ways in which feminism figures in the economy of lesbian S/M fantasy, this anxiety has structured feminism's internal struggles since the late 1970s:

Charges on both sides of the “sex wars” are strikingly similar: both the charge of repression (by the “pro-sex” side) and the charge of replicating masculine desire (by the “anti-sex” side) carry with them the symbolic weight of the father. The ambivalence in assuming the power of either of these positions has to do with the monopoly that men have held over them. We are afraid of collapsing into the very system from which we struggle to liberate ourselves.

(138)

Creet goes on to observe that “a movement built on the repudiation of sexual objectification has had a very difficult time re-embracing sex and its inherent complexity without questioning the tenets of the movement itself” (139).

Transposed to Brossard's text, feminism's “anti-sex” and “pro-sex” arguments run as follows: to present women as participants in scenes of martyrdom or S/M is to replicate masculine desire; to deny women's participation in scenes of martyrdom or S/M is to repress aspects of their subjectivity and sexuality. Cybil's fantasy ostensibly makes the first (antisex) argument. Yet, read symptomatically, it also demonstrates the second (prosex) argument: that is, it betrays the workings of repression. The priest's asceticism, for example, can be read as a figure for the disciplining and regulating of sexual fantasies within the context of feminist antisex discourses. If the leather scene says something about the erotic intensity of the priest's regime of abstinence and self-discipline, it also says something about desires that are not allowed representation within certain discourses of feminism (see Creet 141-45). The desire for mastery mentioned earlier, the desire to make the priest suffer, is perhaps the safest and most representable of these desires because it can be understood as a form of feminist resistance.

Cybil's daydream, which positions Cybil as a voyeur at a male-male leather scene, not only transgresses the very stance against S/M (and pornography) that it sets up but also renegotiates the “turn” in the 1980s among some lesbians, notably among S/M dykes such as Pat Califia, “toward [gay] men as instructors and playmates in the world of sex practices” (Creet 148).²⁴ It is possible, indeed helpful, to read Baroque at Dawn as a meditation on the paradoxes of women's relationships to, and resignification of, the fantasies of gay men. Cybil's and La Sixtine's repeated encounters with eroticized rituals of violence and domination, for example, remind us that women's history of struggle against such rituals informs the lesbian feminist critique of S/M. Women's relationship to the queer culture that Cybil and La Sixtine happen upon in Los Angeles is equally specific. In tracing the ways in which women are effaced by masculine grammars, Baroque at Dawn expresses concern that queer culture will give way to a seemingly neutral and ultimately masculine construction of the subject. Yet, importantly, Brossard's text also recognizes that gay men have opened critical, representational, and erotic spaces for women. The liaison between Cybil and La Sixtine is an effect of such a space, a space imagined and designed by Michelangelo, a man whose principal sexual and emotional ties were with other men. Of course, Brossard's text reimagines the space between Cybil and La Sixtine in terms of a specifically lesbian sexuality and desire. For example, it appropriates details such as the muscular arms of the sibyls—which Saslow takes to be signs of Michelangelo's “obsession with the ideal nude male form” (“Veil” 78)—for its own inquiry into female figures of passion and cultural authority: “The urge to write comes on strong, as muscular as a seductive woman who wants to take her to bed” (143). Nevertheless, the erotics of incongruity that inspire the relationship between Cybil and La Sixtine also inspire that between Brossard's text and Michelangelo's frescoes.

VERITABLE TORMENTS OF PLEASURE

Why has S/M figured so centrally in lesbian feminist debates about sexuality since the 1970s? Discussing this question, Susan Ardill and Sue O'Sullivan speculate that, “in the vacuum of lesbians speaking and writing about sex, the language of sexual excitement used in, for example, Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian SM, resonates with a great many women who are not, technically speaking, into SM” (40). That a language of lesbian S/M might be used to explore and to convey sexual intensity is suggestive for my reading of Brossard's text. Although physical pain does not produce pleasure in the sexual encounters between women in Baroque at Dawn, pleasure is registered poetically on a number of occasions through metaphors of violence, suffering, and physical extremity: the novel opens with La Sixtine's injunction to Cybil to “devastate me, eat me up” (5); in a subsequent liaison, “bodies immolate, immobilize, are a hair's breadth from ecstasy” (36); listening to La Sixtine's violin, Cybil weaves “veritable torments of pleasure” (37); the strident sounds make her think of “Luciano Fontana's paintings which, lacerated with a single stroke, open up, slash at the heart, and pose heartbreak as a fundamental question” (37); later in the narrative, Cybil imagines a woman's “[b]urning lips unbridled on her neck” (143). Through a brief consideration of the discourse of several of the scenes listed above, this final section returns to questions raised throughout the paper regarding the text's appropriation of (and resistance to) the baroque.

Much is made early in Brossard's text of the fact that the two women in the hotel room are strangers to each other, that they have exchanged only two or three sentences before having sex. Although this circumstance is framed in terms of Cybil's resistance to the biographical, it is significant as a departure from lesbian feminist discourses of sexuality of the late 1970s and 1980s. B. Ruby Rich observes that, within the latter discourses, “love replaces marriage as a prerequisite for sex” (529). In representing a sexual encounter between women outside—or on the edges of—an established relationship, the opening scene of Baroque at Dawn marks a departure from such discourses. What is more, the exchange between Cybil and La Sixtine about the former's “habit of ‘taking the elevator’ with perfect strangers” (18) makes an issue of promiscuity, another in a string of “unrespectable issues” that, according to Ardill and O'Sullivan, have led to coalition building among “sexual radicals” (40). Lesbian feminist subculture, they go on to argue, has tended to hang all of “these overlapping issues” from the peg of S/M (40).

The sexual encounter that opens Baroque at Dawn foregrounds—and confounds—postures of submission and domination in the relations between Cybil and La Sixtine. In that encounter, the command to “Devastate me, eat me up” (5), comes from the one who wants to lose herself in a limit experience with another. What Creet calls “the play of power between women” (139), or what Ardill and O'Sullivan call “the sexual dramatization … of power relations” (40), is even more ambivalent in the French text, in which Cybil hears La Sixtine's command to “Dévaste-moi, mange moi” as “Dé, vaste moi, m'ange moi” (13). This densely poetic enunciation, translated as “Day, vastate me, heat me up” (5), emphasizes the instability of relations of power and address within the scene. “Dé,” seemingly addressed to Cybil by La Sixtine, is followed by a noun in apposition, “vaste moi,” which is most easily read as a reference by La Sixtine to herself. Similarly, “m'ange moi” sounds like an imperative addressed to Cybil by La Sixtine but one with the marks of a reflexive verb—that is, something that one does to oneself. The sense of exquisite balance required to sustain the fever pitch of the opening scene is recaptured later in the description of a pair of dancers doing the tango:

Staccato, saw-toothed beats and harmonics command each approach step and separation of the bodies, prolong the pact. Broken rhythm, broken pact. The woman turns about face, the slit of her dress opening from ankle to curve of thigh. The beauty of the coded, fetish movements where equilibrium is both unquestionably perfect and precarious.

(114)

The tango, like the women's sex practice, is a performance subject to strict rules yet susceptible to endless resignification. Both scenes flirt with the contracted roles and ritualized violence of S/M. More specifically, the language of Brossard's text emphasizes movement or play among roles, positions, and modes of address. Power, the text implies, is carefully negotiated and always in flux; it is the angel (“l'ange”) that Cybil hears in La Sixtine's command.

The second time the two women take the elevator together, Cybil watches while La Sixtine painstakingly applies makeup for her evening performance. Watching this ritual produces highly contradictory responses in Cybil: one minute she questions “the tools and strategies devised for facing up” and associates face painting, tattooing, and body piercing with “sensual overkill” (35); the next she takes pleasure in the spectacle and appropriates for a sexual encounter between women lips that glisten red “like a thousand scenarios in the story of women” (36). The reflections prompted by the spectacle of “facing up” help to explain Cybil's ambivalence toward images of torture and suffering in this scene as well as throughout the novel:

Imagination used to give life another twist, implying that life had meaning. When the impression was of happiness, meaning froze. When suffering showed its face, meaning made a comeback, instigated prodigious faiths and terrible altercations in the world of the living. Each altercation generated new words and forced meaning the way you twist an arm.

(35)

Cybil's reflections suggest that suffering, far more than happiness, stimulates the imagination and produces culture. In Baroque at Dawn, suffering helps to generate the vocabulary necessary to write “this violent book” (16) and to explore the intensity of the women's passion. At the same time, the meaning generated by suffering is coercive. Cybil finds herself in a baroque age of cultural transformation in which there are too many aesthetics, “too many feelings, too many bodies of knowledge. Too many signs” to analyse and interpret (145). In spite of this diversity, there is “too much of the same kind of life” (145). Cybil's principal avenue of resistance against this numbing repetition of the same in the guise of difference is to “Decode; evaluate life's chances in view of all the signs. In each sign calculate an added value that lets one dance amid the questions and justify happiness” (35). The text's reimagining of La Sixtine's initial pietà pose as an embrace between Cybil and La Sixtine is a vivid example of this work with signs. In fact, the pietàs of Baroque at Dawn invert the effects of suffering and happiness outlined in the citation above: pleasure produces a living sculpture, whereas suffering produces a frozen statue. Part of what fascinates and disturbs Cybil about the Delfosse painting (as she sees it in her dream) is the peaceful look on the faces in what is, fundamentally, a scene of torture. In the painting of Cybil's dream, “suffering show[s] its face,” and “the impression [is] of happiness.”

The scene in which Cybil watches La Sixtine put on makeup turns out to be an elaborate ritual of foreplay. Cybil's meditation on suffering leads to a sexual encounter: “Everything becomes hazy. The moves are different from the day before. Other words, other caresses. The room fills with a very virgin energy. The bodies immolate, immobilize, are a hair's breadth from ecstasy” (36). If, early in the scene, Cybil qualifies face painting as “sensual overkill,” the scene's climax suggests that Cybil is not immune to the arm twist of spectacle. What is more, the discourse of her sexual pleasure is derived from a vocabulary of extremity shared with Christianity. Like representations of martyrdom in Baroque painting, and like Cybil's fantasy later in the novel, the excerpt above moves ambiguously between the sexual and the religious. In a discussion of feminism's relationship to fantasies of erotic domination, Jessica Benjamin associates continuities between sexual and religious eroticism with the “secularization of society” and the erosion of “previously existing forms of communal life that allowed for ritual transcendence” (296). In her view, “erotic masochism or submission expresses the same need for transcendence of self … formerly satisfied and expressed by religion” (296). Although there are hints of nostalgia in her discourse that have no currency in Brossard's text, Benjamin's insights help to explain why—from painters such as Sodoma to writers such as Brossard—discourses of religious ecstasy are so easily appropriated for discourses of sexual ecstasy (see also Bataille 239). Less clear, of course, is how to negotiate the tension between the narrative of transcendence through sacrifice implied by the words immolate and ecstasy and the resistance to such a narrative elsewhere in the text, particularly in the resignification of the pietà.

As I have suggested at several points in this paper, Cybil is not without her complicities and her contradictions. She is able to analyse the mechanisms by which suffering generates a spectacular array of signs with little possibility for meaningful intervention in culture. For example, when she hears a former member of the Hell's Angels telling other members of her Spanish class about several gang rapes that he had witnessed, she observes that “Any evildoer capable of telling his story with hand over heart indicating confidentiality can sidetrack the subject every time, opening the way for an emotional intimacy that leads one to ‘understand’ the worst crimes and taste the bite of senses sharpened by violence” (101). Yet Cybil herself is susceptible to a poetics of suffering and to “the bite of senses sharpened by violence.” As she listens to La Sixtine's violin, for example, she wonders, “Who has made me this happy in a world of horrors?” (37). In the words of the narrator, “The word horror diverts Cybil's attention briefly but the present returns the stronger for it, brings her back to the raw pleasure of the sounds and heat of the bar” (37). The fact that “the present returns the stronger” for the use of the word horror implies that Cybil participates in a culture in which experience is intensified by suffering. In the sequence of texts that concludes the novel, she suggests as much as she reflects on her urge to see the Delfosse paintings: “It could be, after all, that we're able to reproduce a joie de vivre by introducing as decorative motifs our torments and the odd weak argument not too far off joy” (211).

Cybil's contradictions and complicities are crucial to an understanding of how Brossard's text appropriates and resists the baroque. Cybil is a reluctant participant in the construction of “this violent book,” Baroque at Dawn. Her reluctance stems from a critical awareness of tendencies in a range of discourses—from Christianity to Western science—to aestheticize and eroticize pain. Cybil is also a passionate participant in the projects and relationships in which she engages with other women. Alive to the exuberance and embodied sexuality of the baroque, she nevertheless balks at its rampant spectacle of ritualized violence. For if the baroque is a theatre of sexual intensity, it is also a theatre of pain. The fashioning of the baroque body, especially the cutting and marking of flesh, sits uneasily with a lesbian feminist ethic that “rejects mortification as a way of life” (Brossard, “Kind Skin” 121) and with a lesbian feminist politics loath to risk the appearance of a passionate attachment to the terms of its own subjection (Butler 6). Yet in Baroque at Dawn, a text of unexpected and uneasy conjunctions, it is possible for a meditation on face painting, tattooing, and body piercing—what the text calls “sensual overkill”—to end in a crescendo of lesbian passion.

In resisting an electronic culture that pushes the production of signs to the point of “sensual overkill,” of meaningless repetition that “transforms nothing” (Brossard, “E Muet Mutant” 47), Baroque at Dawn might be said to resist the baroque. However, Brossard's text also turns to the baroque, particularly the subjects of Baroque religious art, to explore new vocabularies and new discourses of lesbian sexuality. Baroque religious art furnishes subjects susceptible to appropriation and resignification (Michelangelo's sibyls, the pietà) and others more susceptible to resistance and critique (Jesuit martyrs). Significantly, in spite of these strategies of resignification and critique, the poetics of suffering and self-sacrifice that subtends images of pietà and martyrs has considerable currency in the text's representations of pleasure, whether sexual pleasure or the pleasure of listening to music or watching a tango. If feminism has a moralizing side, it also has a baroque side. In a sense, Brossard's Baroque at Dawn has it both ways; the text leaves the reader wondering where to draw the line between passion and pain, leatherman and torturer, exuberance and overkill, lesbian feminist resignification and age-old cliché. In the face of such ambivalence—ambivalence so key to the baroque—the reader has little choice but to follow Cybil's injunction to decode.

Notes

1. Throughout the essay, I cite the English translations of Brossard's texts where translations are available. All other translations are mine.

2. I use the term “baroque” to refer to practices and preoccupations that surface in twentieth-century contexts and reserve the term “Barque” for the art historical period from 1580 to 1750.

3. For further discussion of the ways in which the baroque has been appropriated by contemporary Canadian and Québécois women writers and artists, see Moyes, Introduction.

4. Gauvreau is associated with les Automatistes, the group of Québécois poets and painters of the late 1940s and 1950s whose nonfigurative use of words and paint paved the way for the experimental writing and counter-culture of Brossard and other young artists in the late 1960s and 1970s.

5. For André G. Bourassa, Gauvreau uses the term “baroque” in the sense of profusion, generosity, and absolute liberty (29). Michel Peterson's reading of Beauté baroque analyses the baroque as a site of the sublime, a site of the constitution of the self-contradictory subject (363). The term “baroque” does not entirely disappear in the 1970s and 1980s; it surfaces, for example, in the work of Bourassa and Marchand in the late 1970s and in that of Louise Dupré in the late 1980s. With the resurgence of interest in the baroque in the 1990s, the term is used more frequently. See, for example, Robert Richard's 1990 discussion of Hubert Aquin, Claudine Bertrand's 1993 discussion of new tendencies in Québécois writing, Pierre L'Hérault's 1994 discussion of Antonio D'Alfonso, and Peterson's 1994 discussion of Gauvreau.

6. Gauvreau's “beauté baroque” arises in Dupré's study in a reflection on indeterminacy in the writing of Brossard's contemporary, Madeleine Gagnon: “Is this indeterminacy not founded in the refusal of control which results in a warping of taste? As if the proper, classical ‘style’ … were endlessly overextended by exaggeration. As if the poetry showed too much: alternately too lyrical, too theoretical, too allegorical, too anecdotal, too painful, too fragmented. As if from this exacerbation comes a ‘beauté baroque’ to take up Claude Gauvreau's title” (224).

7. As B. Ruby Rich observes in her discussion of the evolution of feminist attitudes toward sexuality in the late 1970s and 1980s, “the defense of lesbian sadomasochism is linked to an attack on 1970s lesbian feminism and its assumed orthodoxy (nonexploitation, equal power relations, and so forth)” (532).

8. Significantly, the image that appears on the cover of the Oxford Dictionary of the Bible (Browning) that I consulted from time to time as I wrote this paper is that of Michelangelo's prophet Zechariah. At the present juncture, an image of one of Michelangelo's five sibyls on such a cover is unlikely—both because a sibyl is pagan and because she is a woman.

9. The ignudi are naked figures that hold up the series of medallions and tablets bearing the names of the prophets and sibyls. Because their function is primarily architectural, Michelangelo had a certain freedom in depicting them (O'Malley 100). Like the captives or slaves whom he carved around the same time, the ignudi prefigure the arrested motion, contorted shapes, and intense facial expressions of baroque sculpture and painting (Blunt 374; O'Malley 101).

10. In French, “Noé, l'arche, tout cela ne pouvait pas être le fruit de notre imagination” (141).

11. Allegory, a form associated with the baroque by Walter Benjamin (166) and Christine Buci-Glucksmann (68), allows for movement between historical moments but also between the mythic and the historical, the spiritual and the material, Michelangelo's frescoes and contemporary lesbian lovers.

12. In spite of the title's emphasis on the Renaissance, the first line of the abstract refers to the “Renaissance and Baroque periods” (90).

13. In his reading of Michel Marc Bouchard's play Les Feluettes (adapted in the film Lilies by John Greyson), Robert K. Martin comments helpfully on the tension between a church “founded on the hatred of the body and the repression of desire” and a church which “makes a place … for the homoerotic.”

14. I do not want to give the impression that classical figures dominate Brossard's texts or that there are only two possible discourses, classical and Christian. In an effort to disrupt prevailing codes and symbols, Brossard's writing ranges widely—from literature to economics to physics to popular culture—and intercalates such discourses in unexpected ways.

15. In conversation at the 1997 Women and Texts conference in Leeds, England, Brossard explained to me that she had asked the artist in charge of designing the cover to collage a pietà, a bridge, and turbulent water; the specific choices and the intense light had been the artist's idea.

16. The accounts of the torture deaths of Jesuits such as Brébeuf and Lalement in the Relations des Jésuites give similar details.

17. Painted by Georges Delfosse (1869-1939) between 1908 and 1909, this painting is not of the Baroque period, but it does depict a seventeenth-century religious subject, the Jesuit martyrs of New France.

18. In his history of the Jesuits, Jean Lacouture finds in the work of nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet a relevant critique of the art inspired by the Jesuits and their “spirit of death” (2: 102). Michelet writes of the irony of Jesuits whose desire to be represented as beautiful and appealing (rather than twisted or tortured) in their martyrdom ultimately translates into ridiculous images of eyes rolling skyward in contrived beatitude and smiles so forced that they verge on grimaces (2: 102).

19. Daly thanks Brossard in her acknowledgements for being an encouraging and faithful colleague. There are numerous parallels in the discourse of the two texts. For example, “Males have tried to rid themselves of their impurities by subliming themselves into ‘God’” (Daly 73); “All this time, the sexes of men were being carved to point straight at the sky, imploring God to do the dirty work of cleansing women's sexes of all impurities so that sons could step over the present and ride off on the stars” (Brossard, Baroque 145).

20. Daly's is part of a wider feminist discourse that considers S/M to be “intrinsically antagonistic to the goals of feminism” (Wilton 53). One finds versions of the discourse against S/M, for example, in works by Sheila Jeffreys; Bev Jo, Linda Strega, and Ruston; Robin Linden et al.; and Irene Reti. Gayle S. Rubin, in her groundbreaking 1984 commentary on the struggle between Women against Pornography and lesbian sadomasochists, expresses the concern that antiporn rhetoric “criticizes non-routine acts of love rather than routine acts of oppression, exploitation, or violence” and “directs legitimate anger at women's lack of personal safety against innocent individuals, practices, and communities” (28). For further discussion of feminism's relationship to S/M, particularly lesbian S/M, see Ardill and O'Sullivan; Califia; Creet; Rich; and Wilton.

21. In French, “Armés d'un vocabulaire neuf, ils laissent les murs tranquilles, préférant dans leur chair des signifiants plus directs” (39; emphasis added).

22. For a helpful overview and excellent bibliography of the much debated relationships among queer theory, feminism, and lesbian and gay sexualities, see Wallace.

23. Judith Butler's response to “the insistence that a subject is passionately attached to his or her own subordination,” one of the sources of this feminist anxiety, is that “the attachment to subjection is produced through the workings of power, and that part of the operation of power is made clear in this psychic effect, one of the most insidious of its productions” (6).

24. Rubin anticipates such a turn when she argues that feminism is not—and should not be—“the privileged site of a theory of sexuality” (32) and that lesbians might explore a theory of sexuality in conjunction with gay men and other sexual minorities as well as with feminists. In her terms, “lesbian feminist ideology has mostly analysed the oppression of lesbians in terms of the oppression of women. However, lesbians are also oppressed as queers and perverts, by the operation of sexual, not gender, stratification. Although it pains many lesbians to think about it, the fact is that lesbians have shared many of the sociological features and suffered from many of the same social penalties as have gay men, sadomasochists, transvestites, and prostitutes” (33).

I would like to thank Nancy Roussy for assisting me in the process of researching this paper, translating citations, and thinking through the contradictions of Brossard's text. I am also grateful to Domenic Benventi for his research on the baroque, Robert K. Martin for his dialogue, and to Ian MacKenzie for his editorial suggestions. The research for this paper was enabled by grants from Fonds pour la formation de Chercheurs et d'Aide à la Recherche, Québec, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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