Free Flesh and Other Fragments of Love by Evelyne de La Chenelière

Flesh and Other Fragments of Love © Copyright 2014 by Linda Gaboriau
    French text copyright © 2012 by Evelyne de la Chenelière. All rights reserved. Adapted from Une vie pour deux copyright © 1978 Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle
    Playwrights Canada Press
    202-269 Richmond Street West, Toronto, ON, Canada M5V 1X1
    phone 416.703.0013 • [email protected] • www.playwrightscanada.com
    No part of this book may be reproduced, downloaded, or used in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for excerpts in a review or by a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca .
    For professional or amateur production rights, please contact: Marie-Pierre Coulombe, Duchesne Artists Agency
    6031 Parc Avenue, Montreal, QC H2V 4H4
    514.274.4607 x105, [email protected]
    Cover art,
Sans titre (drawing)
, 1964, by Hans Bellmer © Estate of Hans Bellmer / SODRAC (2013)
    Cover and book design by Blake Sproule
    The Alegreya serif typeface used was designed by Juan Pablo del Peral. The typefaces is used under the SIL Open font license version 1.1.
    Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
    Chenelière, Évelyne de la, 1975-
    [Chair et autres fragments de l’amour. English]
    Â Â Â Flesh and other fragments of love / Evelyne De La Chenelière
    ; translated by Linda Gaboriau. -- First English edition.
    Electronic monograph in multiple formats.
    Issued also in print format.
    ISBN 978-1-77091-240-3 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-77091-239-7 (pdf).--
    Â Â Â I. Gaboriau, Linda, translator II. Title. III. Title: Chair et
    autres fragments de l’amour. English.
    I. Title
    PS8555.H44526C4413 2014   C841’.54   C2013-907997-1
    C2013-907998-X

    We acknowledge the financial support of the National Translation Program for Book Publishing for our translation activities and the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council (OAC)—an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,681 individual artists and 1,125 organizations in 216 communities across Ontario for a total of $52.8 million—the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

FOREWORD
    Why adapt a novel by Marie Cardinal for the stage today?
    Before speaking about Marie Cardinal’s writing and more specifically about her novel,
Une vie pour deux
,
I must say that the decision to write an adaptation rather than a new play has great significance for me.
    I feel the need to excavate, extract, assemble and respond, rather than to be inspired solely by my own imagination, education, culture and experiences.
    This need is complex, because it has forced me to explore an approach to writing that was unfamiliar to me, an approach I’ve been discovering over the past few months.
    Not to write a new play
    Adapting a novel for the stage has led me to question many things and to take a stand.
    What is the role of literature and playwriting in society today?
    What does it mean to incorporate someone else’s writing into one’s own?
    What, in the writing that I am appropriating, is familiar and what is strange to me?
    Why deconstruct one story rather than create another?
    Why revive Marie Cardinal?
    Can writing free the dead?
    For the time being, I don’t want to lay claim to new ideas.
    I prefer to find my subject matter in existing ideas.
    Consume them, digest them, recycle them in the most noble and most humble sense of that word.
    Yes, I prefer cultural recycling to cultural industry.
    I have accepted my imagination’s fatigue.
    In adopting this approach, I am also questioning the abundance of contemporary playwriting in Québec today.
    For now, I have chosen not to participate in the mad proliferation of new plays that, for the most part, will only get one production, one interpretation, one dimension.
    We are living in the