Pleasure and Purpose in Gail Scott's Heroine

Abstract

Pleasure and Purpose in Gail Scott's Heroine Camille Roy (bio) Why doesn't pleasure matter more? This question came to mind as I slowly read (the better to savor) Gail Scott's re-issued novel Heroine (2019). Set in the late 1970s but read in 2021, in a time of pandemic and lockdown, the social and erotic life of this brilliant feminist novel was almost deliriously engrossing: "The air smells of people, her perfume and the earth swelling due to irrigation from spring runoff. I feel euphoric. My nose moves closer to her wall of silk" (Scott 69). Pleasure is often contextualized with theory in order to be something other than dumb; bodily sensation undermines intellectual credibility. How wrong this is. It also forestalls attention to questions of interest related to narrative and narrative structure. For example, how does one construct a sentence (which has political aims) with pleasure as one of its rationales? What is the argument, implicit or otherwise, of a book which proceeds through time via pleasure? Doing and undoing are different projects. If pleasure can be an organizing force in life, what occurs as a result? Let's begin with the pleasure of foraging through the world, with curiosity, seeking delight. Begin with Montreal itself. The city is capacious and present throughout Heroine, in every physical and social sense. Sex workers, lesbians, communists, cafés, political meetings, actions, and their arguments all have their fire. The present time of the text has a particular gleam: Walking to the bank she notices the sky has a flat and shiny quality, like a knife-blade. Opening the bank door, she [End Page 393] senses the air inside is thin as cellophane. The woman next in line, with aquiline nose, curly hair, and coat open over enormous breasts, immediately starts talking. Complaining about how the bank is exploiting ordinary people with its long lines. Eventually she discloses her father was a socialist journalist in Vienna. The heroine nods sympathetically. (169) By degrees it becomes clear that the whole book is narrated by a woman in a bathtub. Her ruminations shift back and forth in time like a bead on a wire. Periodically she pauses to pleasure herself: "Please, froth, fall gently now on my small point. Sometimes after a while it gets so sore I call it my dolorous reptile" (66). The arc of knowing begins with desire. From this small point her consciousness roams across the city. Heroine handles the ungraspable complexity of a city by spilling out into ancillary characters, narratives, and refrains. This seems to also reflect the impish quality of a narrative organized around pleasure—there is always another provocative and tasty distraction. The threads do not need to intersect. A little girl in a yellow raincoat is fleeing a sandwich man. Her narrative of chase, hiding, escape recurs across the book. Prostitutes stream across the pages, stamping in the cold, warming up in the cafes: "Some hookers were standing round drinking hot chocolate. One was so wired up she kept doing a high step still holding her cup. Right leg over left leg. Twice. Left leg over right" (15). Such episodes create a rhythmic stride across the text. The subject to which she always returns is romantic obsession: "In the ecstasy of hayflowers my singing body couldn't get enough. As if it were being penetrated by a butterfly" (53). Her male lover is one of the leaders in a radical left group. Politics is both his epic romance and a domineering logic. He tells her, "The human race has but two choices, barbarism or Marxist revolution" (46). Revolutionary ardor is his justification for elusiveness and infidelity. She is caught in a deeply desired but utterly unsatisfying relationship. Lust, disappointment, ravenous need, and insecurity all oscillate; through frustration the novel accumulates a kind of density. This portrait of relationships on the left at that time reminded me of my old friend L. She was a member of the Detroit Chapter of the Weather Underground [End Page 394] in the 1970s. She once told me (with the satisfaction of a comeuppance) that what destroyed the organization was not the FBI or the police but...