Pleasure and Purpose in Gail Scott's Heroine

Abstract

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: