Anne Hbert

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Hébert, Anne (1916-2000). Canadian poet and novelist. Born in the village of Sainte-Catherine de Fossambault, she grew up in family homes there and in Quebec. It was a happy environment, in which she was encouraged to write by her father, a civil servant and a writer, and strongly influenced by her cousin, the poet Saint-Denys Garneau, whose accidental death in 1943 precipitated a powerful movement of revolt in her writing. Her early work was published in Canada, but since the 1950s she has been mainly published in Paris, and has made her home there, with frequent visits to her native land.

Hébert first became known as a poet. Les Songes en équilibre (1942) explores in a free verse of great purity the experience of being in the world, and particularly the natural world of Quebec. In Le Tombeau des rois (1953) the link between the poet and the world is broken; under the influence of her cousin's death, the poet confronts destruction and negation, embodying her quest in powerful symbols, notably that of the ancient tomb suggested in the title poem, which begins memorably: ‘J'ai mon cœur au poing | Comme un faucon aveugle.’ Mystère de la parole (1960) suggests a partial victory of light over darkness and a reconciliation of the poet and the world through the power of the word.

The symbolic force so evident in Hébert's poetry is also constantly present in the prose fiction for which she is now best known (she has also written a number of plays). The novella Le Torrent (written 1945, published 1950) announces many of the themes of her novels. The hero-narrator of this monologue is literally struck deaf by his fierce mother, who destined him for the Church to expiate the sins of her youth, but this deafness draws him towards the turbulent forces of life and death, the ‘torrent’ of the title. This terrible parable has been described as ‘l'expression la plus juste qui nous ait été donnée du drame spirituel du Canada français’ (G. Marcotte). Similar conflicts of instinct and repression, nature and culture, are explored in a series of impressive novels, all set in Quebec province and figuring passionate and violent protagonists, particularly women. Kamouraska (1970, Prix des Libraires) is based on a real-life murder case in 19th-c. Quebec; Les Enfants du sabbat (1975), set in the 1940s, is a story of witchcraft in a convent; Les Fous de Bassan (1982, Prix Fémina) is an extraordinary Faulknerian evocation of the violent natural world of the Gaspé peninsula and an investigation by six different narrators of a crime of rape and murder. More recently, Le Premier Jardin (1988) is less haunted by violence; it shows the return to Quebec city of an ageing actress who uncovers and accepts her half-forgotten youth. All of these novels are distinguished not only by their dramatic power, but by narrative inventiveness and a use of words which is that of the poet.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• R. Lacôte, Anne Hébert (1969)