Pierre

M. Morgan Holmes teaches English at McGill University.

Relentless in its penetrating exploration of human barbarity,
Marie-Claire Blais’s Pierre is a nightmare in prose. Styling himself a
young Werther or Rimbaud, the book’s namesake abandons the comforts of
his youth for the fantasy of becoming what he calls a “warrior,” a
“man of steel,” an apocalyptic angel of destruction. Alternately
stomach-turning and infuriating, his psychotic meditations begin, little
by little, to acquire a perverse sort of sense.

At first, Pierre’s rebellion seems to be merely a form of puerile
posing: “I had begun to dress in black leather and had acquired the
indispensable motorcycle that was associated in the public’s eye with
those phantoms of destruction.” In the “glorious springtime” of
his twisted awakening, however, Pierre becomes the self-destructive
fulcrum of Western hypermasculinity taken to its logical extreme: “men
build arms, I told myself, and organize themselves into armies. They are
giants, they alone possess the power to destroy the earth.” As a
“real” man, Pierre comes to worship skinheads and to despise his
parents and sisters for their denial of the destructive, oppressive
roots of society. While Blais does not condone pillage and murder, she
makes a powerful case for bourgeois culpability in producing thieves,
homicidal maniacs, and suicidal gender roles.

In this bildungsroman from hell, recognition of social insanity is all
that can be expected. Blais presents a brutal picture but refuses to
comment on her visions, thus rejecting the fiction of transcendent
authorship. Her violent visions coupled with this silence will certainly
alienate many readers. Those who persist, however, will be rewarded not
with conventional closure but with a terrifying picture of the direction
Western society is taking.