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

illusion of spontaneous generations where everyone believes that he has given birth to himself.
    A reign of artists and writers who have no predecessors, no parents and a lot of originality.
    Before we drown in the flood of cultural products generated by our haste and our blindness, I’m stopping.
    It’s a pleasure to put invention aside for a while and to concentrate on another woman’s words (to say it). *
    Not the latest fashion
    Marie Cardinal was obsessed by themes that challenge me.
    They challenge me in part because these themes are absolutely not the latest fashion: the experience of motherhood, childhood landscapes, falling in and out of love, nostalgia, femininity, inner growth, introspection, literature. Today, violence, cruelty, disposable human relationships, the inner void and perversion are fashionable. So why adapt the work of a novelist so far from the latest fashion?
    In recent years Marie Cardinal has been relegated to the purgatory where important writers land when they die. They stay there for a while before people become interested in their work again.
    I am interested in this novel because I have the intuition that I can extract from it a substance that will reveal the force and the necessity of Marie Cardinal’s writing.
    Marie Cardinal attempted, in her work as a writer and in her lifestyle, to reinvent the couple, the family, what it means to be a woman and, more particularly, an intellectual, creative woman. I believe she wanted to set us free from definitions.
    It is in part thanks to her that today I, like many others, am able to seek balance and fulfillment without resorting to sacrifice, despair, total abnegation or the negation of the individuals in my life.
    That doesn’t mean that Marie Cardinal achieved her goal, or me mine. It simply means that we are allowed, as individuals and as a society, to imagine that apparently contradictory and incompatible desires can coexist in a woman’s life. That is huge. Perhaps May ’68 in France and the Quiet Revolution in Québec did not succeed in transforming an alienating system, nor did they turn the devastating tide of unbridled capitalism, but these revolutions transformed private life forever.
    It is a novel about our most private lives that I have appropriated. A novel that approaches the body as a landscape, and landscape as a body.
    A kind of autopsy of romantic love.
    A conversation with her
    The Marie Cardinal I knew was already in the grips of the aphasia that deprived her of words and the ability to articulate her thoughts. What a cruel twist of fate for a woman of letters to be sentenced to silence.
    Needless to say, I never had long conversations with Marie Cardinal and I regret that. I wish that I could have met her earlier, or that her words could have abandoned her later.
    Today I am avenging that fate: I’m having a conversation with her.
    * A reference to Marie Cardinal’s best-selling novel,
Les mots pour le dire/The Words to Say It.

La chair et autres
fragments de l’amour
was first produced in the original French at Espace Go in Montreal on April 24, 2012, in a production directed by Alice Ronfard. It featured the following cast and creative team:
    Pierre: Jean-François Casabonne
    Simone: Violette Chauveau
    Mary: Evelyne de la Chenelière
    Assistant director and stage manager: Alexandra Sutto
    Set design: Gabriel Tsampalieros
    Lighting: Caroline Ross
    Costumes: Ginette Noiseux
    Music: Simon Carpentier
    Flesh and Other Fragments of Love
was first produced in English by Tarragon Theatre, Toronto. It ran from January 15 to February 16, 2014, with the following cast and creative team:

    Pierre: Blair Williams
    Simone: Maria del Mar
    Mary: Nicole Underhay
    Director: Richard Rose
    Assistant director: Andrea Donaldson
    Set and costume design: Karyn McCallum
    Lighting design: Rebecca Picherack
    Sound design: Todd Charlton
    Stage management: Marinda de Beer
    Assistant stage management: Marc