“Impossible to break into nice free stroll” Canadian Re-citations of Paris in Gail Scott’s My Paris
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Date
2011
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Abstract
The narrator/writer of Gail Scott’s novel My Paris (1999) finds herself in an overdetermined
urban space of contemporary Paris. The space, already multiply written and rich in
cultural associations, is re-worked again in the fragmented “diary,” in which the narrator both
echoes and contests her literary guides, primarily Gertrude Stein’s work and Walter Benjamin’s
Arcades Project. Her Paris emerges as a re-citation of the Paris inscribed in those and other texts,
reconfigured from a perspective marked by temporal remove, which is stressed in the novel. Scott
explores multiple, criss-crossing spaces of the city: those of architecture, culture, race, gender,
nationality. While the text’s concern is to move to and fro “across comma of difference,” and to
avoid binary oppositions without obliterating the all-important comma, it politicises its postmodern
concerns. The article explores the postcolonial dimension of Scott’s novel, which, though
not necessarily foregrounded, provides an important conceptual thread of the text. The narrator,
a bilingual Québécoise, considers spaces of alterity and otherness of Paris, explicitly relating
them to Canadian national experience. From this perspective the enticement and impossibility
of the unitary construct of a nation symbolised by the republics of France and the United States
are explored. The postcolonial reflection is closely related to the notion of a non-unitary, nomad
subject that emerges from the novel.
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Quebec novel in English, Gail Scott, postcolonial urban space, Canadian literature, experimental writing in Quebec, postcolonial literature
Citation
Romanica Silesiana vol. 6, 2011, pp. 148-159