Note to Self
BY Sue McCluskey
If Bridget Jones’s latest diary doesn’t give you enough of a cerebral workout, consider the translation of French-Canadian feminist Nicole Brossard.
Intimate Journal, Or Here’s a Manuscript (The Mercury Press, 2004) is part fiction, part travel journal, part poetry, post-everything. Montreal’s Brossard is up to her usual playfulness, but the result is unusually accessible.
Originally written in French for a Radio-Canada broadcast performance in 1983, and translated into English by Barbara Godard, the journal entries marry Brossard’s enigmatic, interrogative style with the impressionistic style commonly seen in travel writing.
But the travels are not linear, nor solely physical, nor do they follow any particular timeline. The entries read like snippets of streams of consciousness from a slightly sharper consciousness—a consciousness trained to interrogate its own observations with meditation, wit, chronological anomalies (“I shifted the date of my journal by one day so as to imagine the sensation it would give me to think that I am writing tomorrow”) and constant questioning.
Now that journaling has become a bona fide genre of literature—and the primary domain of women, at that—Brossard the ardent deconstructionist links it slyly to other feminine preoccupations (“keeping a journal is like keeping house”). What is a journal, she asks: “Literature that won’t look like literature? Writing that will not be writing?”
Dripping with ideas about writing, biography and the passage of time, this long-overdue translation would be an excellent starting point for any reader new to Brossard’s work.
