Anne Hébert’s Am I disturbing you? raises a number of questions of method that I have been thinking about lately. For starters, and the most obvious one, the “novel” deliberately plays with the conventions of prose in order to produce a ‘poetic’ effect (the cover wrap openly declares the text a ‘poetic tale’). What makes it ‘poetic’? Well, it includes long sections of introspective, choppy dialogue that draws attention to the language rather than to the events described. Indeed, the sensuous language becomes the point of a number of sections rather than any semantic implications.

The story is simple: two men hap upon a young girl lost and bedraggled and take her home. She is pregnant and they adopt her, and help her on her quest to reunite with her lover. One of the men falls in love with her, the other becomes her protector. The baby dies, the men fail, and Delphine, the girl, loses her will to live. I think, with this précis, I have missed perhaps one or two from the novel. The rest of the text is made up of Hebért’s stylized prose, hung on the lips of the young, confused girl, describing her hunt for her former lover:

I just had to go wherever Patrick was going with his heavy suitcases. To surprise him. To see and be seen by him. Without really wanting to. Or deciding to. Only a diary in my head that I had to follow to the letter to fulfil my need to be with him. A sort of obligation, stronger than anything else. A tremendous stubbornness. I followed him from station to station, from train to train, from town to town, from hotel to hotel. Always, I was there waiting, and he thought he was going crazy. And I thought I was going crazy. Always, he was surrounded by people he knew. They mustn’t see us together. Pretend not to know each other in stations and hotels.

What interests me about this text is the point of demarcation between poetry and prose. It’s been said before, but considering how valued prose is and how poorly valued poetry is, it seems worth attempting to approach the question in relation to texts that blur the borders. I am not particularly interested in the question ‘why does the author blur the borders’ nor am I particularly interested in dividing the text into either category exclusively. I am interested in the fact that parts of this novel feel like prose and others like poetry – that you can actually experience the split while reading. The plot inches forward (prose) and then, in another long dialogue segment, the bottom drops out, and meaning becomes embroiled in the expression and the means of expression (poetry). The way the text is organized makes it actually feel as if Hébert calculated (probably by intuition, these things being rarely mathematical – unless you are Ernest Buckler or Christian Bök) the ratio of poetry to prose sections.

Paul Valéry loosely defined the terms in relation to his experience as a reader and a writer: prose was the “rapid passage over words” whereas poetry was the experience of being “jolted out of my habitual state of mind.” Considering the explosion of poetic forms – despite whatever conservative streak there may be, poetry is no longer defined or determined by exclusive forms – the experience of being jolted is a fairly convincing definition of the poetic object. It excludes us, repels us, pushes us around itself, only gradually revealing its subtle magic and mystery: it relies on our ability to fill in the blanks with thoughts new to our thinking; which is in fact more of a willingness than an ability. This also usefully explains why prose is popular and poetry not: for prose seduces us into a sweeping motion, and we enter into its rhythm and escape. Poetry, on the other hand, forces us through the conflagration of disjunction, estrangement, defamiliarization, and jouissance to discover and uncover new ways of thinking. In an already overworked and overtaxed society, the stable drift of prose, the giving over of oneself to the storyteller, with all of the comforts of passivity, creates a needed coherence and meaning in the world – precisely what poetry tends to undermine, challenge, or shift.

In this novel, the character Delphine – the oracle – speaks poetry into the comfortable lives of the men, gradually disaccommodating them, breaking up their reality, and gradually shifting them outside of themselves. The prose sections accumulate around them, and their efforts to find her, contain her, deal with her, seduce her, or capture her. She is a hermeneutic gap, however, they struggle, unsuccessfully, to fill. The title refers to her provocation – the grand hope of the poetic jolt.

Anne Hébert Am I disturbing you? (Anansi 1999) Translated by Sheila Fischman