FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Nancy Huston's brilliant ambiguities
Calgary writer's love of new language (and Paris) parallels Samuel Beckett's
by Harry VandervlistNancy Huston is crying, shedding tears at the sight of the revolving KFC sign on McLeod Trail. Sure, this is strange, but in order to understand just how strange you have to arrive at this story through the correct door. The door marked "preconceptions about Nancy Huston, bilingual author." Not one, but two of her novels appeared in English this fall: Slow Emergencies, and The Goldberg Variations.
Born in Calgary, she left at 20 for Paris where she has studied, lived and worked since. The brilliant critic Roland Barthes supervised her graduate work. The brilliant theorist and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov became her husband. The brilliant Nancy Huston has published 15 novels and books of essays in both English and French. She's won or been nominated for the highest literary prizes in Canada and France. She gained notoriety in the US for her 1995 essay meditating on the unjust consequences of the fact that she just happens to be a) beautiful and b) intelligent. So some of the preconceptions are: cerebral, Euro-sophisticated, formidable.
And yet there she was in Calgary this fall, being filmed for a French documentary, weeping at her window in the Howard Johnson hotel.
"The film crew asked me, 'Why are you crying?' And all I could tell them was, because they have no KFC in Paris. But that is not the real reason, though I genuinely love KFC." (Huston meditates on some of the real reasons later this winter in a Saturday Night article on "ambiguous patriotism.") As she explains all of this in Toronto, she stands in the cowboy boots bought for her on the film trip and wears, of all things, a broach with a tiny painting of chuckwagon races. Clearly she's still more Calgarian than anyone knew. Those are chuckwagons, right?
"No, no, not at all," she laughs, as if laughing is something she enjoys more than you expect a cerebral Parisian to do. "No, these are troikas, this is a very, very old Russian pin."
Oh. She laughs some more. We're back to the European again. Yet conversing with Huston shows very quickly that this movement between identities, this shuttling between supposed differences and extremes, is at the heart of her story and her work.
Slow Emergencies and The Goldberg Variations seem the work of two different authors. Slow Emergencies presents Lin, a dancer / choreographer so madly in love with motherhood that she calls her first pregnancy "a nine-month orgasm." Domestic life has never been portrayed as such a passionate experience. Yet any passion can fade. Which is stronger, Lin's love for her new life or her need to create dance? Huston explores her themes in scenes of unfettered immediacy. A film adaptation of Slow Emergencies is in the works and the book should lend itself to cinema.
The same can't be said for Variations, first written in French in 1981. This elaborate novel made up of 30 related interior monologues was written as a carefully planned "performance" during a two-week stay in Urbino, Italy. It reflects a time Huston "was leaping out of theory and into fiction." Variations "is dedicated to Barthes and certainly bears his imprint." But Huston realized that though theorizing about literature was stimulating, "these were not the books I would take to a desert island. Books of theory weren't helping me to live. Novels help you to live." The differences between Variations and Slow Emergencies reflect almost 15 years of development in fiction. Now, Huston feels, she has discovered "the freedom to take risks, to let characters breathe and change and develop."
Huston's own changes and development make her hard to place as Calgarian, Parisian or anything else. Where does she place herself? For a parallel she looks to Irish author Samuel Beckett, who also moved to Paris and adopted French for his work. "If I'm like anyone, I'm like Beckett, because he wanted to get away from childhood tensions." For both of them, Huston feels, the decision to write in a new language "was a totally personal and psychologically-determined choice, not a politically-determined choice. We are both refugees from mental disaster." Huston also looks to Marguerite Duras, who she says "managed to invent a new language within the French language. She also has a deep understanding of the relations between men and women."
If she has a place, perhaps it is the "between" in the relations between men and women, her birthplace and her adopted home, or her mother tongue and the language of art. Between may be the best place to be for the kind of vital empathy and imagination Huston brings to a life and work spent puncturing preconceptions.
(Harry Vandervlist spoke with Nancy Huston at Toronto's International Festival of Authors)
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