Of all the nations of the French diaspora, Quebec offers the most courageous example of cultural survival [see also Acadia]. Quebec has a cultural vitality which belies its tiny population (7 million, over 80 per cent French-speaking) and its precarious situation. It is one of ten provinces in the Canadian Confederation, and in spite of strong centralizing pressures has achieved a considerable degree of autonomy. The tension created by dissatisfaction with lack of sovereignty has proved stimulating. However, too extreme a nationalist reading of Quebec culture should be avoided.
1. Beginnings
The myth of origins is a powerful one in Quebec [for the settlement of the province, see Colonization, 1]. The three log-books of Jacques Cartier have been described by more than one writer as Canada's Genesis. The ‘relation de voyage’ is a distinct genre in North American literature, a work of inauguration, founding the land, naming people, places, and things, and by the act of naming appropriating them, conveying something of the fear, surprise, and passion the new land inspires. The literary monument of New France is the series of Relations des Jésuites published in Paris from 1632 to 1673, works of propaganda for the mission to Canada. They transcribe letters from widely scattered outposts, describing fearlessly the hardships and the joys, and the martyrdom of several of the missionaries.
The mystical writings of Marie de l'Incarnation [see Devotional Writing, 2], founder of Quebec's Ursuline Convent, earned her the title ‘Thérèse du Canada’ from Bossuet. The independent mind and encyclopedic curiosity of La Hontan make him one of the most caustic observers of life in New France, and the spirited letters of the devout Élisabeth Begon reveal that, despite the clergy, winter in Montreal was a lively time. Molière and Corneille were performed in Quebec in the 17th c., the Jesuits opened a seminary there in 1663, and the Recollets had theirs in Ville-Marie (Montreal). The Ursulines educated the young ladies. There were libraries, one of 2, 000 volumes. The Indians were troublesome, fire and disease also threatened life, but there was little of the famine that was common in France. The poverty of the feudal superiors (the seigneurial system was founded in 1634) made for a reasonably egalitarian society.
2. 1763-1900
By the Treaty of Paris, which concluded the Seven Years War, New France was ceded to Britain in 1763, and French ceased to be an official language of the colony until 1848. Excluded from public life, the previously urban Canadiens retreated into a folk society of subsistence farmers. This rural people found its voice in the years between the Conquest of 1763 and the rebellion of 1837-8, through journalism, education, and the political movement for responsible government, which led to armed insurrection. Michel Bibaud (1782-1837) edited five of the literary journals of the early 1800s and published the first literary work to appear in French in North America, Épîtres, satires, chansons, épigrammes et autres pièces de vers (1830). His most spirited writing comes in his satires inspired by Boileau denouncing the ignorance, superstition, and lack of taste of his compatriots. But he salutes with hope and enthusiasm the founding of five new classical collèges. Georges Boucher de Boucherville, author of Une de perdue, deux de trouvées (1864-5), Joseph Doutre, future president of the Institut Canadien de Montréal, with a long historical novel, Les Fiancés de 1812 (1844), his poet friend Joseph Lenoir, Eugène l'Écuyer, author of La Fille du brigand (1844), and the Cornelian tragedy, Le Jeune Latour (1844) by Antoine Gérin-Lajoie, all point to the quality of the education dispensed by the Jesuits.
These young men were attracted by the radical Louis-Joseph Papineau, inspirer of the insurrection for political reform of 1837, by Lammenais and the Romantics, and by the courage of the Institut Canadien (1844), which repeatedly refused to ban books proscribed by the Church. The rebellion finds an echo in some of the writing of the time. The first Canadian novel in French, L'Influence d'un livre (1837) by the younger Philippe Aubert de Gaspé, a haunting reflection of the rebellion, presents itself as the ‘premier roman de mœurs canadien’ but is, in reality, a roman noir in the manner of Sue or Nodier. His father and co-author, an impoverished seigneur, twice wrote his memoirs, the first time in the form of a novel, Les Anciens Canadiens (1863). The troubles produced a gripping novella, Le Rebelle (1841) by the French baron de Trobriand, and some moving letters from the chevalier de Lorimier, one of a dozen patriots executed, besides the many exiled.
The year 1839 saw the publication of the Durham Report, a disparaging account of the insurrection of 1837. The response to this was to be the monumental Histoire du Canada (1845-8) by Francois-Xavier Garneau, a work of great erudition and literary merit which sets out to revive the spirits of the Canadiens by recounting the courage of their ancestors. The other outstanding publication from the same period is James Huston's Répertoire national (1848-50), collecting the best in Canadian writing from the previous fifty years. This includes the complete novel La Terre paternelle (1846) by Patrice Lacombe, the prototype of the ‘roman de la fidélité’ which dominated the form for 100 years (the tradition was continued in 1874 and 1876 in the two volumes of Antoine Gérin-Lajoie's influential Jean Rivard). In 1863, meanwhile, Joseph-Charles Taché published his collection of the legends, place-names, folk-songs, and tales associated with fur trade and lumber-camp, Forestiers et voyageurs. In this way, with Garneau, Huston, the Aubert de Gaspés, Lacombe, and Taché, the foundations of a national literature were soundly laid in the space of 20 years.
The buoyant liberalism of the historian Garneau, though greatly admired, did not set the tone in the 19th c., the second half of which was marked by the ultra-conservative Catholic revival associated with Pius IX, and the Church's domination of Quebec society, often felt by writers as highly oppressive, was to last until 1960 (see below, Section 5). Abbé Henri-Raymond Casgrain saw to it that literature became the servant of this crusading ideology. Only the stylish Arthur Buies (1840-1901) saw the advantage of the railways, the great 19th-c. adventure, for economic growth and French influence.
Nothing so far had prepared for the genius of Émile Nelligan. Interested only in French literature at school, he devoured the poetry printed in the Montreal journals Le Samedi and Le Monde illustré. He was greeted with rapturous acclaim when he read his poems, brilliant pastiches of Baudelaire and Verlaine, at public meetings of the École Littéraire de Montréal. Laure Conan (Félicité Angers) surprised readers too, with Angéline de Montbrun (1882), the first French-Canadian psychological novel to give any depth to characters and any subtlety to plot and situation.
3. 1900-1945
Quebec's literature is a colonial literature. It responds belatedly to changes in fashion in France. The influence of the Realists and Naturalists, for example, was slow to appear. Rodolphe Girard's Marie Calumet (1904) was condemned by the Church for its crude satire. Albert Laberge, unwilling to risk his career as a journalist, circulated privately his bitter portrait of rural life, La Scouine. Louis Hémon's celebration of the pioneering life, Maria Chapdelaine (1914), outdid the Québécois at their own game. Claude-Henri Grignon rewrote the rural myth, with a miser for the central character of Un homme et son péché (1933), and Ringuet produced in Trente arpents (1938) the outstanding québécois rural novel, a portrait of decline inspired by Maupassant. Germaine Guévremont renewed the genre completely, giving it a woman's angle from the interior of the farmhouse, injecting life into the static rural community through Le Survenant (1945), while creating an authentic Canadian prose style.
Un homme et son péché became a popular radio series. Robert Choquette wrote for radio his Pension Leblanc (1927), mirroring the impact of urban sophistication on the timeless countryside, and went on to a career in television. Both media were greeted avidly by the Québécois, starved of excitement. Literature, the minority pursuit of doctors, lawyers, journalists, and priests, a largely week-end occupation, became just one aspect of a multi-media culture.
If radio fed the popular imagination, the academic world did the same for the élite, pilloried by Jean-Charles Harvey as the Demi-civilisés (1934), a novel banned by the Church for its depiction of free love. In the same period two clerics, Lionel Groulx and Camille Roy (author of a Manuel d'histoire de la littérature canadienne-francaise, 1920), both helped create a sense of identity and self-sufficiency strong enough to take responsibility for its own destiny. Journalism and the prose d'idées is a major genre in French Canada, and Groulx's Action francaise (1921-8, later Action nationale), sounding readers' opinion through a score of social surveys, begins to confront the myth of French Canada with some solid social observation. Quebec culture was stimulated by the increasingly numerous ‘retours d'Europe’ and European visitors. The journal La Relève was given encouragement by Mounier and inspired by the visit of Maritain.
The most important genre in the first half of the 20th c. is poetry. Albert Lozeau, confined to bed with Pott's Disease, produced a number of books of intimist verse, beginning with L'Âme solitaire (1907). Many poets were, like him, solitary and hypersensitive. Guy Delahaye (Guillaume Lahaise), who spent a year at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, has a fine sense of the ‘mensonge du cœur’. Jean-Aubert Loranger, another ‘retour d'Europe’ and who had read the NRF of Paulhan and Éluard, found it hard to readjust: ‘Ouvre cette porte où je pleure.’
Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, however, fled from the oppressive weight of France's high culture after only three weeks. He marks an important new departure for Quebec. Hitherto, writers had belonged exclusively to the educated and leisured middle-class. Theirs was the intellectual world of Mauriac, Gilson, and Maritain as purveyed second-hand by Le Devoir and the Relations dominicaines. Garneau was from the same milieu as these writers, and was conscious of his descent from the family of Francois-Xavier Garneau; he differed from them, however, in his intense commitment to the world of art and of the spirit.
François Hertel's Leur Inquiétude (1936), Rex Desmarchais's La Chesnaie (1942), and much later André Laurendeau's Une vie d'enfer (1965) catch the ideological turmoil and the spiritual malaise of this culture, out of step with its official image. Meanwhile the historical novel was glorifying the heroic age of Canada's pioneers (e.g. Léo-Paul Desrosiers, Nord-Sud, 1931). For the critic Jacques Blais, however, the two outstanding works of the late 1930s are Saint-Denys Garneau's Regards et jeux dans l'espace and Félix-Antoine Savard's prose epic Menaud Maître-draveur, both of 1937, the latter a parable pointing to the alarming influence of American capital and predatory life-style.
4. 1945-1960
Quebec was ripe for modernity when in 1948 Borduas and his group published their Surrealist manifesto Refus global. It begins with a brief history of Quebec's spiritual deformity. The Church, says Borduas, maintained the French Canadians in a state of fear, in ignorance of international currents of thought, condemned to perpetual inferiority. There seemed no hope of escape from this spiritual blockade, but foreign wars and the salutary influence of certain ‘poétes maudits’ (Lautréamont and Rimbaud, no doubt, but also Nelligan and Garneau) brought the unhoped-for release. New publishing houses not tied to clerical censorship, the Éditions Erta (1949), the Éditions de l'Hexagone (1953), and journals such as Cité libre (1951) and Liberté (1959) and the intellectual journalism of André Laurendeau in Le Devoir, created a plurality of voices in opposition to the oppressive regime of premier Maurice Duplessis. A series of strikes in the 1950s and the lessons in democracy learnt by the trade-union movement gave depth to this opposition.
The post-war novel has a decidedly new look, not in its technique, which remains wedded to realism, but in its subject-matter, tone, and ambition. Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'occasion (1945; Prix Fémina, 1947) and Roger Lemelin's Au pied de la pente douce (1944) present powerful social frescos with the accent on the poverty and lack of social opportunity in the working-class suburbs of Montreal and Quebec. Jean-Jules Richard uses the war and the asbestos strike of 1949 (a turning-point in the history of Quebec) as the backdrop to his angry Neufjours de haine (1948) and Ville rouge (1949). André Langevin's tryptich, Évadés de la nuit (1951), Poussiére sur la ville (1953), and Le Temps des hommes (1956), sounds the first stirrings of revolt. Alienation is the theme, too, of the prose writings of poet Anne Hébert. ‘J'étais un enfant dépossedé du monde’, the first line of Le Torrent (1950), sets the tone of the 1950s.
5. The ‘Révolution Tranquille’
Gaston Miron and his friends founded Les Éditions de L'Hexagone in 1953 with an avowed policy of national action through publishing. He was one of the first to recognize the significance of Refus global. Miron believes that Quebec poetry has a hidden genealogy. He admires authentic Quebec poets such as Alfred Desrochers, author of A l'ombre de l'Orford (1930). His own gritty, awkward, heroic verse is the best writing Quebec has produced, slim though his production is. The generation of the Hexagone begins to offer signs of the camaraderie which characterizes the artistic exploration of the 1960s. Movements such as the group associated with Parti pris, a left-wing journal and publishing house which issued Paul Chamberland's Ginsberg-like L'Afficheur hurle (1965), Jacques Renaud's fierce short stories in Le Cassé (1964), and Pierre Vallière's Nègres blancs d'Amérique (1968), are all symptoms of the transformation which followed the death of Maurice Duplessis in 1959.
In the ‘Révolution Tranquille’, the Catholic Church rapidly lost its influence in politics, sold off its stake in education, and saw a rapid decline in vocations and in church-going. The contraceptive pill started a sexual revolution fuelled by American counter-culture. The Liberal governments (1960-6) created a Ministry of Education, a Ministry of Cultural Affairs, and a Société Générale de Financement to stimulate investment, reform the civil service, and nationalize Quebec's vast hydro-electric industry. This latter was carried through by René Lévesque, a popular television presenter, journalist, and trade-unionist, who became one of the most charismatic of Quebec's leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. The Federal Inquiry into Bilingualism and Biculturalism, dreamed up by André Laurendeau, became a national forum on the twin cultures of Canada, their coexistence, and the future of a distinct French identity. The democractization of education, the egalitarianism of hippy culture, and the quest for identity and authenticity which mark post-war Existentialism led to experiments in joual, literature written in the vernacular. More successful was the poetry of popular hargne in the writing of Gérald Godin, Les Cantouques (1967): ‘ouatche-toe stun crisse un tabarnaque’ (i.e. ‘watch out, he's a real so-and-so’, the words ‘crisse’ and ‘tabarnaque’ being deformations of ‘Christ’ and ‘tabernacle’). Like Miron, he showed that joual is a marvellous ‘langue à sacres’ (sacrer is québécois for ‘to swear’). The political reforms introduced by the Liberals were rapidly overtaken on the Left by the student uprising of 1968 and the serious terrorism of the Front de Libération du Québec, culminating in the October crisis of 1970.
The most brilliant expression of the anger and turmoil of the 1960s comes in the fiction of Hubert Aquin. The schizophrenia which drove him to suicide in 1975 does not mask the playfulness and the profound but oblique commentary on Quebec's situation offered by Prochain épisode (1965), Trou de mémoire (1968), and L'Antiphonaire (1969). If the Quebec writer was silenced by aphasia, the chansonniers (Félix Leclerc, Gilles Vigneault, Pauline Julien, Monique Leyrac, Robert Charlebois, Diane Dufresne, Clémence Desrochers) were not only teaching Canada to sing its exuberance but were leading the international ‘Francofête’.
Literature reflected the quest for independence. Michéle Lalonde's ‘Speak White’ (1968) is a strident denunciation of the oppressive superiority of the language and culture of Shakespeare. Meanwhile, there were those whose commitment to art sat uneasily with any ideology. The Liberté group (led by the poet Jean-Guy Pilon) was suspicious of the parochial culture of French Canada and was always open to international influences through its ‘rencontres d'écrivains’. The dominant theme of the 1960s is a disincarnated patriotism. The theme of the pays takes highly personal forms in the work of Roland Giguère, poet of L'Âge de la parole, Yves Préfontaine, creating a poetry of the Northlands, Paul-Marie Lapointe, turning a Federal guide to the trees of Canada and Frére Marie-Victorin's Flore laurentienne (1935) into an ambitious celebration, Jacques Godbout, film-maker and entrepreneur, publishing in Paris his sardonic fables Salut Galarneau! (1967), D'Amour, P. Q. (1972), and questioning the viability of Quebec culture in a monopolistic market.
There is something bleak and haunting about the Quebec psyche: witness first novels such as La Fille laide (Yves Thériault, 1950), La Belle Bête (Marie-Claire Blais, 1959), and L'Avalée des avalés (Réjean Ducharme, 1966). The world of ugliness and Gothic horror is not rare. In a different dark vein, Gilbert Laroque (Aprés la boue, 1972; Serge d'entre les morts, 1976) and Victor-Lévy Beaulieu (Jos Connaissant, 1970) fictionalize brilliant, sordid fantasies, and Michel Tremblay tenderly re-creates the grim family world of his plays in his novels of the ‘Plateau Mont-Royal’ chronicle. Claude Jasmin vainly searches for a refuge from life in La Corde au cou (1960) and Ethel et le terroriste (1964). His La Sabliére (1979) more serenely portrays the wonder of childhood, as do Antonine Maillet, from On a mangé la dune (1962) to L'Oursiade (1990), and Jacques Ferron in l'Amélanchier (1970), half-playful, half-polemical, quietly scornful of the ‘mythe de la race’.
6. Since 1970
Two political events mark the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976 Quebec elected a Parti Québécois government which promptly acted to defend French language and education. The euphoria this generated released writers from the nagging feeling of being conscripts in a cultural battle, compelled to contribute their page to a corporate national text. The writer was now free to create, a freedom often strange and frightening. And then, in 1980, the ‘yes’ faction in a referendum on national sovereignty could only muster 40 per cent of the vote. This was not so much Quebec giving Canada a last chance, an offer Canada subsequently declined, as a failure of nerve by a nation asked to take the plunge. These events have produced a grave disarray, a cultural pluralism defying analysis.
The women's movement has burst upon the literary scene, triumphantly self-assured in an age of uncertainty. It has displayed great tenderness, wit, and sophistication in its handling of the many issues of feminism: the rewriting of sexist history, language, and mythology. Louky Bersianik in L'Euguélionne (1976) has produced a women's bible; Madeleine Gagnon has explored the psychology of the matriarchal heritage; Nicole Brossard has renewed the language and the tools of fiction through her own writing and through the lead she has given in the journals La Barre du jour and La Nouvelle BDJ.
The feminist movement has also been strong in the theatre, where women's groups have participated enthusiastically in the innovatory forms of drama which have been one of the features of the 1980s and 1990s. This new theatre combines music, dance, mime, and movement to produce a dramatic form in which speech is only one of many expressive elements. Having no author in the conventional sense, and no published text, such productions are often the collective creation of the actors themselves. But they can often be attributed also to the individual talent of their artistic director, who has total control over all the elements of the work. Many of the outstanding dramatic events of recent times have been due to this new breed of theatrical personality working in concert with companies devoted to innovation. Such is the case of Gilles Maheu and Carbone 14 with Le Rail (1985) and Le Dortoir (1989); of J. P. Ronfard and NTE with Vie et mort du roi boiteux (1982); and Robert Lepage and Théâtre Répère with La Trilogie du dragon (1985), among many others. Lepage, indeed, has become a peripatetic international star, carrying his spectacular exercises in stagecraft into guest productions in London, Paris, New York, and elsewhere. This emphasis on ensemble production, however, does not spell the demise of the individual author. On the contrary, writers like Marie Laberge (Aurélie, ma sœur, 1988), René-Daniel Dubois (Being at home with Claude, 1985), Normand Chaurette (Provincetown Playhouse, juillet 1919, j'avais 19 ans, 1981), and Michel Marc Bouchard (Les Feluettes, 1989) constitute a new theatrical avant-garde worthy of their great predecessor Tremblay.
With such a surge of dramatic talent, and an equally strong profile in other areas such as ballet and modern dance, illustrated by companies like Là là là Human Steps and O Vertigo, Quebec has emerged as one of the leading nations in the performing arts. A significant achievement in cinema should not be forgotten either, although volume film-making in Quebec did not begin until the 1960s. Following the international successes in the 1970s of Claude Jutra (Mon oncle Antoine, 1971), Jean Beaudin (J. A. Martin Photographe, 1976), and Francis Manckiewicz (Les Bons Débarras, 1979), critical acclaim and commercial success have come more easily to increasing numbers of film-makers. Particularly notable are Denys Arcand (Le Déclin de l'empire américain, 1986; Jésus de Montréal, 1989), Léa Pool (La Femme de l'hôtel, 1984), and Jean-Claude Lauzon (Un zoo la nuit, 1987).
Altogether, despite the difficulties of Quebec's constitutional position within Canada and the deflating effect of the referendum result, literature and the arts have never been more flourishing than in the 1980s and 1990s. While this is essentially a spontaneous, self-generating phenomenon, it has been greatly boosted by generous government funding for every form of culture. Governments of all persuasions have seen the promotion of a strong québécois culture as fundamental for preserving Quebec's identity as a French-speaking nation in North America. The results have certainly justified the investment.
[Cedric May with Ian Lockerbie]
Bibliography
- L. Mailhot, La Littérature québécoise, 2nd edn. (1975)
- W. Toye (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1983)
- G. Vincenthier, Histoire des idées au Québec (1983)
- L. Gauvin and G. Miron, Écrivains contemporains du Québec (1989)
