Résumés
Keywords:
- essay,
- personal essay,
- illness narrative,
- Joan Didion,
- narrative imagining,
- literary mind,
- parable,
- rereading,
- self-understanding
Mots-clés :
- essai,
- essai personnel,
- récit de la maladie,
- Joan Didion,
- imaginaire narratif,
- esprit littéraire,
- parabole,
- relecture,
- compréhension de soi
Sometimes the magic in an essay will leave markings on my bones, and help me heal. With this one, we’re in New York at twilight, in a passage of Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That (GTAT, hereafter). She’s twenty-something and new in town, and above all, she’s late to meet a friend. Yet, somewhere along Lexington Avenue, she enters a store. She comes out with a peach in her hand and stands on the sidewalk to eat it. “I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume,” she writes. With time, and with every new reading, a connection’s been carved somewhere inside me. Whenever I push the pivoting doors of a subway entrance in Montréal—large, heavy steel doors that sometimes exhale so much they’ll make your eyelids flinch—there’s a chance Didion’s peach will spring into my thoughts. The scene has become the kind of flash cut that spends most of its time down in the depths, but that sometimes crops up to be caught in the spotlight of thought, breaching the current of consciousness. Just the way, some places along the St. Lawrence River, white whales will come up for air before slipping back below, briefly dazzling those humans who happen to be watching, and who know so little of what’s going on in the deep. I, for one, had been ill for a while—and still I hadn’t a clue what was going on in the deep. “Consciousness is a wonderful instrument for helping us to focus,” writes Mark Turner in The Literary Mind, “but it is a liar about mind. It shamelessly represents itself as comprehensive and all-governing, when in fact the real work is often done elsewhere, in ways too fast and too smart and too effective for slow, stupid, unreliable consciousness to do more than glimpse, dream of, and envy”. So, the cognitive scientist invites us to be a little envious, and to look past the illusion of an all-embracing conscious attention. His theory then runs something like this: long before we humans could utter words, early members of our species would quite naturally interpret the world through the lens of “narrative imagining”—through stories. A complex of interrelated actors, objects, and events was always, to our pre-verbal eyes and mind, appreciably at play. With generations of insistent imagining, a pool of narrative schemas began to form in the mind, schemas which our most ancient tropes now point to. Take one example. Behind such a common saying as “When the cat’s away, the mice will play,” we find a skeleton of a story, an abstract narrative that informs us about the typical interactions of predators and their prey. Yet, there’s always a hunch within the human mind, an inkling that has us thinking: a story never ends there. In fact, a story might never end, at all. Once its spine is abstracted, a story can prove useful well beyond its plainest level of interpretation—beyond mice having a jamboree while the cat is out and about, teaching Alice a few life lessons. Taking up the adage again, we’ll readily project the narrative backbone of “When the cat’s away” onto another story we’re witnessing in our world, in a (quite effortless) effort to make sense of this new situation: “said at the office, [the narrative backbone] can be projected onto a story of boss and workers. Said in the classroom, it can be projected onto a story of teacher and students. Said of sexual relationships, it can …