MONTREAL - Not long ago, film director Denys Arcand published an essay celebrating Ringuet’s novel Trente Arpents, probably the greatest of Quebec’s many novels of the soil. Such novels were popular at the turn of the last century; writers including Zola and Polish Nobel Prize-winner Wladyslaw Reymont produced memorable examples. Ringuet’s is a masterpiece. The tale of the growing alienation of the hero from his farm, his family and ultimately from his country is harrowing and unforgettable. But Arcand went beyond mere praise of Ringuet (a nom de plume for Philippe Panneton): he exhorted us to rediscover Quebec literature of the past. It is a literary tradition worth discovering for both French and English Quebecers.
I have always felt a certain irritation when my authenticity as a Quebecer has been questioned because of my indifference to this province’s very popular chansonniers or the Cirque du Soleil. It may be that this indifference shows a certain limitation on my part, but it is also unfortunate that so few have read the great works that have followed and described the evolution of Quebec from a small, abandoned colony to a modern, sophisticated nation.
It helps to understand the Conquest and the uprising of the Patriotes through the eyes of novelists. In Les Anciens Canadiens, by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé, and Les habits rouges, by Robert de Roquebrune, we have vivid, realistic portrayals with sympathetic depictions of both English and French characters, and in both novels we find a love affair across language lines.
The epoch of exploration and the fur trade also produced a masterpiece, Les Engagés du Grand Portage, by Léo-Paul Desrosiers. It has a universal and tragic message in the destruction of a noble, naïve man by a cunning and ruthless one.
Throughout the 19th century, the peasant tradition remained strong here, and we can taste the quality of life in that rural, Catholic Quebec in Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s two-part novel Jean Rivard, which praises rural life over the temptations of cities, as well as in Louis Hémon’s justly celebrated Maria Chapdelaine. The rural novels explain both the beauty and the limitations of that formative part of Quebec’s history.
In the 20th century, the rural novel Un homme et son péché by Claude-Henri Grignon depicts a classic miser, wonderfully named Séraphin Poudrier, who is in no way inferior as a caricature to Balzac’s Gobseck, Gogol’s Plyushkin and even Molière’s Harpagon.
Lest we think that men wrote all the Quebec classics, we should consider Laure Conan’s strangely ambivalent and even Freudian Angéline de Montbrun and the fascinating diary of Henriette Dessaulles, which allows us to savour ordinary, everyday life. Among the last and best of the rural novels are the two written by Germaine Guèvremont, Le Survenant and Marie-Didace. While not as dark as Trente Arpents, they are descriptive of rural life at a time when urbanization had already started.
Early-20th-century literature introduced urban, industrial and business problems and manifested growing impatience with Quebec’s traditional piety. Gérard Bessette, Jean-Charles Harvey and Roger Lemelin are examples of the proto-modern writers whose world, while different from ours, becomes less exotic and whose characters resemble people we know. Ringuet’s urban novels, such as Le Poids du jour, are also modern in tone, and it is fascinating to explore with him the streets of Montreal in the 1930s — almost as we know them, but much less developed.
The works of Gabrielle Roy, whose Bonheur d’occasion is a masterpiece of Canadian literature, mark the emergence of modern Quebec writing; soon we read Marie-Claire Blais, Hubert Aquin, Antonine Maillet, Michel Tremblay, Mordecai Richler and many others. This literature is well-known and is not at all neglected. But Quebecers often forget to read the works that served as foundations for the great flowering after the Second World War. There is much more than the works mentioned above. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in its literary output, Quebec has been particularly fertile ground since 1800, and that its literature closely follows its evolution as a society.
One more issue must be raised. Several years ago, William Johnson did a disservice to Quebec literature by publishing a book dedicated to proving its xenophobic and ultra-nationalist nature. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Some works, notably those of Lionel Groulx and Félix-Antoine Savard, were indeed very nationalistic. Abbé Groulx’s novel L’Appel de la race was completely marred by his chauvinism and overt racism. The literary worth of Savard’s Menaud, maître-draveur is more debatable, but it is significant that even Savard later regretted his extreme vehemence. But most of Quebec’s literature was nationalistic only to the extent common in countries that had been conquered, like India and Poland. Ringuet, who was no ultra-nationalist and who served as a Canadian diplomat, also described with sympathy the then-popular dream of a “Laurentie” that would become a French-speaking homeland.
Most of Quebec’s major literary works were fair to their English subjects. De Gaspé, in his Mémoires, speaks of French and English friends with equal affection, as does Dessaulles. Moreover, many Quebec writers, like Honoré Beaugrand, were anti-clerical and liberal in outlook and did not accept the Catholic “identity” that mainstream Quebecers assumed. Most of the classics express universal values. Describing them as anti-English, or refusing to see any justification for their affirmation of French Canada, is nothing short of perverse.
While all Quebecers would benefit from reading the older Quebec literature, English Quebecers have the most to gain. It is impossible to open oneself to these works without acquiring an affection for Quebec and an understanding of its history, and without seeing Quebec’s present aspirations in a sympathetic light.
Many anglophones are unaware of this side of Quebec. Arcand’s exhortation to read these works should be heeded by all, but particularly by English Quebecers.
Julius H. Grey is a Montreal attorney.