Catherine Mavrikakis was born in Chicago. Her French-born mother, “like so many European immigrants of her generation, wanted her daughter to be American.” She gave birth at St. Mary’s Hospital in Cook County before returning to Montreal two months later. The writer has visited the United States all her life: to visit her family, to visit campuses as part of her work as a literature researcher or simply for tourist purposes.
Now, she had dreamed for a long time of fulfilling an empty promise from her father; that of going on the road and traveling the country by car, leaving Montreal heading straight to the Pacific, going down from Portland to Los Angeles, returning via Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, then Memphis , Nashville and Ohio.
Urged by her editors to take up the pen in view of the American election on November 5, Catherine Mavrikakis seized the opportunity, fulfilling her childhood dream, heading for the American west coast, thus following in the footsteps of great writers of the road, from Jack London to Cormac McCarthy, including Jack Kerouac, Jim Harrison, Barbara Kingsolver and Joan Didion.
The author, who also teaches literature at the University of Montreal, therefore begins the story On the roads. A strange journey from Chicago to Alamogordoby addressing the scope of travel literature, the end of which was announced in 2006 by Cormac McCarthy, in his apocalyptic novel The Road. For McCarthy, “all real and metaphorical paths to the future have disappeared,” she writes. We have, I tell myself, finally finished with the American imagination of the road and progress.”
The power of the anecdote
With her somewhat anachronistic journey, in a world where the efficiency of planes has long since supplanted the slowness required by roads, Catherine Mavrikakis therefore sets out to test the limits of this imagination, and to see if the paths that cross American territories can still trace a route to the future.
By crisscrossing the vast spaces that connect cities together, the writer chooses to take a curious and critical look at the people she meets as well as the territories she travels through, keeping in mind the stories of conquest. , deportation, exploitation, broken promises and cycles of poverty which shape these different places, just like their literary mythology.
To do this, she makes the small story resonate with the big one, finding in the human and the anecdote the source of her narrative reflection. She recounts her encounter with a hotel receptionist in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, who equates climate change with divine punishment, and the panic of a waiter at a Memphis restaurant following the attempt to the assassination of Donald Trump. She draws a parallel between the song Born This Way of Lady Gaga resounding in the cabin of her car and the abortion debate in Wyoming. It also recalls the scientific ambitions of Los Alamos, in the Rio Grande Valley, which remains, more than 80 years after the nuclear experiments of the Manhattan Project, a huge laboratory founded by the American government.
“The anecdote has a surprising value,” underlines the author, sitting around a coffee in Montreal. It is a key to a possible understanding, without however allowing a conclusion to be drawn. Anecdotes carry stories, but not history at all. Everyone can contextualize it and reconstruct it differently. The anecdote is in itself literary. »
A possible future?
Throughout her wanderings, Catherine Mavrikakis also lingers to observe spaces, repeatedly being surprised by the desolation she finds in her path. “I especially felt this emptiness in the South, going from Phoenix to Dallas. I had the impression that there was not only a lot of poverty, but also spaces unable to look to the future, mired in the ruins of the past. There were dumps, old deposits, booths made for digging for oil that seemed abandoned in the fields. There was in these landscapes something of the order of the end. »
Refusing that this finality does not lead to a rebirth, the novelist tries to imagine in the chaotic, sinuous and poetic movements of words what the road to the future as promised by the great emancipatory literature could look like, in 2024. of America, Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac at the head. “During this summer in the car, I had a hard time dreaming of this future. Before Kamala Harris entered the race, the entire left seemed to have lost hope. Now, at least, young people are a little more mobilized. Today we are perhaps witnessing the end of a civilization, for the better, perhaps more than for the worse. But to these young people who are just asking to exist, we must still counter this discourse of the end, to offer possibilities for reconstruction. »
On the roads. A strange journey from Chicago to Alamagordo
Catherine Mavrikakis, Héliotrope, Montréal, 2024, 126 pages
