Literature and Painting In Quebec: From Imagery to Identity 9781442698291

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. The Landscape of Quebec: Nature and Culture, Space and Place
Chapter One. The French Heritage: From Utopia to Eden
Chapter Two. Race, Place, and Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Short Story
Chapter Three. The Father’s Land Lost: Country versus City in the Early Novel
Chapter Four. New Horizons in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel
Chapter Five. Impressionism and Nationalism in the Early Twentieth Century
Chapter Six. Space, Place, and a Race That Will Not Die
Chapter Seven. Liberation and Modernity in the Wake of the War
Chapter Eight. From Solitude to Solidarity: La montagne secrète
Chapter Nine. From Confinement to Constellation: Le premier jardin
Chapter Ten. ‘My Land(scape) is Winter’
Conclusion. From Imagery to Identity
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

LITERATURE AND PAINTING IN QUEBEC From Imagery to Identity

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WILLIAM J. BERG

Literature and Painting in Quebec From Imagery to Identity

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2012 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada isbn 978-1-4426-4398-7

Printed on acid-free paper Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Berg, William J. Literature and painting in Quebec : from imagery to identity / William J. Berg. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-4426-4398-7 1. Canadian literature (French) – History and criticism. 2. Art and literature – Québec (Province) – History. 3. Art, French-Canadian – Québec (Province) – Themes, motives. 4. Landscape painting, Canadian – Québec (Province) – History. 5. Imagery (Psychology) in literature. 6. Imagery (Psychology) in art. 7. National characteristics, French-Canadian, in literature. 8. National characteristics, French-Canadian, in art. I. Title. ps8131.q8b47 2012

c840.9'357

c2012-901843-0

The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities. Images and copyrights have been obtained with the help of a grant from the Délégation du Québec à Chicago (Quebec Delegation in Chicago), using funds provided by the Gouvernement du Québec, Ministère des Relations internationales, dans le cadre du Programme d’études sur le Québec (Quebec Studies Program), volet professeurs et chercheurs (Professors and Researchers Component).

For Olivia, Erin, Ainsley, Vaughn, Austin, Aurelia, Laeken, Owen, and Nora

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments xi Introduction: The Landscape of Quebec: Nature and Culture, Space and Place 3 1 The French Heritage: From Utopia to Eden 13 2 Race, Place, and Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Short Story 37 3 The Father’s Land Lost: Country versus City in the Early Novel 66 4 New Horizons in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel 97 5 Impressionism and Nationalism in the Early Twentieth Century 131 6 Space, Place, and a Race That Will Not Die 155 7 Liberation and Modernity in the Wake of the War 190 8 From Solitude to Solidarity: La montagne secrète 216 9 From Confinement to Constellation: Le premier jardin 241 10 ‘My Land(scape) is Winter’ 269 Conclusion: From Imagery to Identity 299 Notes

311

Works Cited 347 Index

373

Colour plates follow page 196

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Illustrations

Black and White Illustrations 1.1 Jacopo Gastaldi. La Terra de Hochelaga, 1556. Book illustration. 18 1.2 Samuel de Champlain. L’Habitation de Québec, 1613. Book illustration. 27 1.3 Anonymous, La France apportant la foi aux Hurons de la Nouvelle France, circa 1660. Attributed to Frère Luc, aka Claude François. 30 2.1 Joseph Légaré, Martyre de Françoise Brunon-Gonannhatenha, 1827–40. 46 2.2 Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté. La mort de Cadieux, 1907. 59 2.3 Henri Julien. La Chasse-galerie, 1892. 65 3.1 Joseph Légaré. Le Canadien, 1833. 77 4.1 Horatio Walker. Les battures de l’île aux Grues, 1885. 109 4.2 William Brymner. Ils aimaient à lire dans les ruisseaux fuyants, 1885. 111 4.3 Laure Conan. Paysage de Neuville, circa 1900. 127 5.1 Maurice Cullen. Près des Éboulements, 1928. 148 5.2 James Wilson Morrice. Maison de ferme québécoise, circa 1921. 150 5.3 Clarence Gagnon. La Croix de chemin en hiver, 1916. 153 6.1 Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté. Ite misse est. 1916. 159 6.2 Clarence Gagnon. L’église de Péribonka, 1933. 160 6.3 Jean Paul Lemieux, L’église de Péribonka, 1981. 162 6.4 René Richard. Campement, circa 1975. 180 6.5 René Richard. Les draveurs, circa 1979. 182 8.1 René Richard. Homme adossé à un arbre, 1975. 219 8.2 René Richard. Le campement, circa 1930. 235

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Illustrations

9.1 Raynald Leclerc. Fleuron néo-gothique. La porte Saint-Louis, 2003. 248 9.2 Raynald Leclerc. Regard d’un parc tranquille. Le parc Montmorency, 2003. 255 10.1 Mabel May. Flocons. Fenêtre de l’atelier, 1921. 275 10.2 Albert Henry Robinson. Vue de Baie-Saint-Paul en hiver, circa 1923. 279 Colour Plates (Colour plates follow page 196.) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Clarence Gagnon. Crépuscule sur la Côte-Nord, 1924. Thomas Davies, A View of the Montmorency Falls near Quebec, 1791. Joseph Légaré, Paysage au monument à Wolfe, circa 1845. Cornelius Krieghoff. Québec vu de la pointe de Lévy, 1853. Ozias Leduc. Le Cumulus bleu, 1913. Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté. Après-midi d’avril, 1920. René Richard. Territoire de Menaud, circa 1979. Paul-Émile Borduas. Les arbres dans la nuit, 1943. Alfred Pellan. Jardin vert, 1958. Jean-Paul Riopelle. La montagne, 1966. René Richard. Sans titre ou La montagne secrète, circa 1975. René Richard. La montagne de mes rêves, circa 1975. Raynald Leclerc. S’éclate la lumière. La rue Sainte-Anne, 2003. Bruno Côté. Rang Cap-aux-Corbeaux, circa 2000. Christian Bergeron. Village en hiver, 2010. Raynald Leclerc. Vue du ciel (Québec), 2010.

Acknowledgments

It has been my great fortune to be married to a long-time colleague, sometime co-author, and full-time inspiration, Laurey Martin-Berg, who read the manuscript several times, providing numerous insights and suggestions. Special thanks go also to Siobhan McMenemy, editor extraordinaire at the University of Toronto Press, for her advice and encouragement in shepherding the manuscript through the submission process. For her expertise in guiding the book (and me) through the production process, I am very grateful to Frances Mundy, and I commend Leah Connor for her thorough, thoughtful, and judicious copy editing. Jessica Lynn Martin was more than generous in applying her computer wizardry to formatting the manuscript. I hope that the outside readers of the manuscript, professors Mariel O’Neill-Karch and Gaëtan Brulotte, will be gratified to see so many of their suggestions incorporated into the book. I am grateful to the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (particularly Kel MorinParsons), the Délégation du Québec à Chicago (particularly Jennifer Herlein and Marc Boucher), and the University of Wisconsin HalversonBascom fund for their generous funding in support of the project. Another grant would be welcome to cover the number of copies I will gladly and gratefully send to the following people who have assisted me in completing the book: Sylvie Bourget, Raynald Leclerc, Christine Marsan, Christian Bergeron, Vincent Fortier, Dr Christian Tschanz, Me Marc Bellemare, Gisèle Deschênes Wagner, and Dean May for their generous offers of images and permissions; Cyril Simard and Claude Dubé from the Fondation René Richard for their support; Jane Moss, editor of Québec Studies, as well as Mary Jean Green and Émile Talbot, readers of an article that formed the base of chapter two, for their

xii Acknowledgments

enthusiasm for the project; the following representatives of the various museums and institutions who provided images, texts, and permissions for the book: Phyllis Smith, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec; Marie-Claude Saia, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; Belma Buljubasic, National Gallery of Canada; Myriam Van Neste, Musée des Ursulines de Québec; Felicia Cukier, Art Gallery of Ontario; Sarah Dick, The Beaverbrook Art Gallery; Janine Butler, McMichael Canadian Art Collection; Sylvie Brière, Éditions de l’Hexagone; Stéphane Aleixandre, SODRAC; Alan Baglia, ARS; Jeannine Messier-LaRochelle, Éditions Fides; André Michaud, Gestion A. S. L. INC; Francyne Furtado, Éditions de la Nouvelle Arc; and the staffs of various archives and libraries who allowed me to consult their holdings: the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, the McGill University Library Colgate Collection, the Library and Archives Canada, le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (especially Lise Nadeau and Josée Lachance), le Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, l’Université Laval, the Biliothèque René Richard in Baie-Saint-Paul, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Library, Kohler Art Library, and Interlibrary Loan Services.

LITERATURE AND PAINTING IN QUEBEC

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Introduction

The Landscape of Quebec: Nature and Culture, Space and Place

In an exploration of literature and painting in Quebec across time, a focus on the landscape – its verbal description and its visual representation – opens an avenue that enables us to pass from seemingly simple imagery to the exceedingly complex question of national identity. To undertake this passage, however, means locating the best vehicle, and indeed, we need look no further than to the time-tested pairings of nature and culture and space and place. The call of the wilderness counterweighted by nostalgia for culture has long characterized the French perception, construction, and representation of the North American landscape. From the writings of the earliest French explorers to the paintings of the latest Quebecois landscape artists, vast space is seen as coexisting alongside closed place in a perpetual state of dynamic interplay. Throughout the ages, cultural tools – ranging from naming, mapping, and flag planting to fences, fields, and farms; from forts, churches, and monuments to paintings, stories, and songs – have been mustered to cope with the otherness of nature, while simultaneously acknowledging its powerful allure. The intersections of culture with nature often occur at defined places in relation to the undifferentiated vastness of the surrounding space, and their proximate combination constitutes what is perhaps the most striking feature of the North American landscape and its representation in the literature and painting of Quebec.1 The garden and the wilderness, the civilized and the ‘savage,’ the familiar and the unknown, security and adventure, the habitant and the coureur de bois, the European and the Amerindian – all are juxtaposed and superimposed to produce original couplings befitting the hybrid combinations of place, space, and race discovered in the New World. More than a type of representation, however,

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Introduction

the painted or written image becomes a primary means of probing issues of French-Canadian identity, itself defined, to a major extent, by the interplay of nature and culture and the interaction of various cultures. Only tangentially theoretical, this book is primarily analytical in view of the concrete texts and paintings it examines in detail; comparative and interdisciplinary in relating works of different genres on the basis of period, topic, theme, style, ideology, and often direct influence; and synthetic in terms of its scope, encompassing works from the earliest eras of European presence in the New World to the present. Yet, having now put into play the terms of this chapter’s title, along with the equally elusive ones of ‘imagery’ and ‘identity’ in the book’s subtitle, I would like to propose some operational definitions, with full intent to modify them as they arise in specific cases. Nature and Culture As in most French dictionaries, Le Petit Robert’s first definition of ‘culture’ involves cultivating the land, as in the English word agriculture. In this sense, culture implies the imposition of order and productivity on nature, which then becomes the negative correlative, that is, that which defies human control, whether the wilderness or the weather.2 By extension, a second, figurative definition of culture involves the cultivating of human faculties, such as thinking, judging, perceiving, and communicating; and by further extension, those qualities that distinguish one society or social group from another, such as language, customs, institutions, symbols, and myths.3 All three definitions pertain to this study, in that they relate, respectively but not exclusively, to the construction, perception, and representation of the landscape. Despite Édouard Herriot’s oft-quoted aphorism that culture is what remains when one has forgotten everything (‘La culture, c’est ce qui reste quand on a tout oublié’), a nation’s culture is clearly a matter of memory, as the motto on today’s Quebec license plate, ‘Je me souviens’ (I remember), suggests and the subtitle of Fernand Dumont’s classic work Le lieu de l’homme: La culture comme distance et mémoire (The Place of Man: Culture as Distance and Memory) confirms.4 And, as repositories of memory, the memorial and the memoir, the landscape and landscape representation, become the primary means of preserving cultural heritage, which, as the geographer Luc Bureau concludes, invariably involves contradictory elements: ‘Car une culture atteint son identité non pas par un seul ou quelques-uns de ses éléments montés en graine,

Introduction

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mais bien plus dans leur opposition à la fois destructrice et créatrice.’ (165; For a culture acquires its identity not by a single element or several of its elements aging, but much more by their opposition, which is at once destructive and creative.)5 Through its capacity to crystallize and juxtapose such contrasting components proximately and simultaneously, the painted or written landscape becomes, like the land itself, a lieu de mémoire (site of memory),6 not only a landmark of Quebec heritage but also, by its permanence, a major means of commemorating and preserving it. Space and Place In addition to the nature / culture dyad, a pair of parallel terms that occurs with great frequency in discussions of the landscape is space / place. As the poet and critic Pierre Nepveu puts it: ‘L’espace donne le vertige, mais il permet aussi de se sauver, ou de croire que l’on se sauve (dans les deux sens d’une fuite et d’un salut). Le lieu, lui, est éminemment vulnérable: l’ici-maintenant constitue le projet à la fois le plus noble et le plus fragile. L’habitation est chaleur, proximité des choses et des corps, abri, séparation d’avec le continuum naturel. Mais en même temps, elle est la possibilité d’entendre tous les bruits, même les plus anciens que l’on croyait enfouis.’ (204; Space gives one vertigo, but it also enables one to save or believe in saving oneself (in the sense of both escape and salvation). Place, on the other hand, is eminently vulnerable: the here and now constitutes the project that is at once the most noble and most fragile. Habitation is warmth, proximity of things and bodies, shelter, separation from the natural continuum. But at the same time it is the possibility of hearing all sounds, even the most ancient ones that were believed buried.) Although Nepveu especially contrasts exterior and interior environments, such as horizon and hearth, the outside landscape itself also accommodates the juxtaposition of space and place. Similar to Nepveu, who distinguishes between the ‘separation’ of place from the ‘continuum’ of nature, I tend to define ‘place’ quite traditionally as a point (whatever its extent) that defines itself against vast, undifferentiated ‘space’: ‘l’espace sans bornes’ (unbounded space).7 In this sense, I see place as a relationship, constructed consciously, not unlike culture, whereas space is a field experienced visually and viscerally, as is nature. One can, to be sure, have a defined place, like a rock, that remains natural, until it is named and assigned a cultural function, such as a ‘Council Rock’ or a memorial (chapter two). One can also have an

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Introduction

undifferentiated space that is eminently cultural, such as the Canadian north or the American frontier, concepts that remain elusive until they are reached, explored, and named, at which point they become places (chapter seven). One can even have what is usually considered a defined ‘place,’ such as a city, transformed into a ‘space’ if experienced as undifferentiated, as in an urban ‘wasteland’ or, to the contrary, the ‘promised land’ (chapter six).8 More common, however, is the intersection of the terms space and place with those of nature and culture, as we see again in Dumont’s title, Le lieu de l’homme: La culture comme distance et mémoire, which equates place (‘lieu’) with culture (‘la culture’). This fascinating work may seem too abstract to apply to a study of landscape in its most concrete sense, but even a statement as dense as ‘si la culture est un lieu, ce n’est pas comme une assise de la conscience, mais comme une distance qu’elle a pour fonction de créer’ (270; if culture is a place, it is not so as a foundation for consciousness, but as a distance that it serves to create) invokes the notions of place (‘un lieu’) and space (‘une distance’), albeit in the context of an inner environment (‘la conscience’), which is, nonetheless, highly applicable to our exploration of identity. In effect, Dumont distinguishes between a first type of culture (‘culture première’), inherited as a given set of objects, symbols, customs, and language practices (149), and a second type (‘culture seconde’), which involves a coherent set of collective values, absent from everyday life yet intuited by ‘la conscience’ (both conscience and consciousness) from nostalgia for the past and exposure to great works of art (87). This other sense of culture is experienced as a distance, which generates both the capacity and the compulsion to reflect on present practices and past traditions with a certain objectivity and freedom that potentially enable man to define and improve his ‘place’ (255–7) in a universe whose meanings and modalities are constantly shifting. Such a notion of cultural ‘doubling’ (73; dédoublement) provides interesting perspectives from which to approach the circumstances of colonization, assimilation, and acculturation that have characterized Quebec’s history as well as issues like hybrid identity, present from as early as the French colonial period (chapters one and two), and multiculturalism, at the centre of today’s identitary debates (chapters nine and ten). Imagery and Identity The landscape, characterized as it is by the interaction of nature and culture and of space and place, is represented through an ‘image’ (or

Introduction

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collectively, ‘imagery’), defined by John Berger as ‘a sight which has been recreated or reproduced’ (9). A ‘sight,’ however, is itself constructed through the process of visual perception, which brings it to consciousness, such that Jean-Paul Sartre contends that the word ‘image’ can indicate only the relation of consciousness to the object – the manner in which the object appears to consciousness, or rather, the way in which consciousness presents an object to itself (17), a definition that is equally germane to our discussion, especially in relation to written descriptions of the landscape, which often detail the progressive stages of perception. At the same time, as W.J.T. Mitchell notes, ‘images are now regarded as the sort of sign that presents a deceptive appearance of naturalness and transparence concealing an opaque, distorting, arbitrary mechanism of representation, a process of ideological mystification’ (Iconology, 8), and it is as a repository of ideology that the image leads us towards the elusive notion of identity. In a recent collection of texts dealing with the question of FrenchCanadian identity, Quête identitaire et littérature: De Canadien à Québécois, Serge Provencher begins his introduction with a definition of identity by Renald Legendre that works well here: ‘Structure psychosociale constituée des caractères fondamentaux les plus représentatifs d’une personne ou d’un groupe’ (Legendre, 696; A psychosocial structure constituted by the fundamental characteristics that are the most representative of a person or a group). On a national level (‘groupe’), the qualification ‘caractères fondamentaux’ reminds us that we are dealing not only with customs and icons, but especially with their underlying values, much as in Dumont’s concept of second culture. Identity will evolve and may, even must, involve contradictions. Indeed, in a recent exploration of the age-old question of French-Canadian identity in the wake of the Conquest, Jocelyn Létourneau, one of Quebec’s premier contemporary thinkers, emphasizes the notion of ambivalence, of wilful contradiction: Au chapitre de l’identité, les Canadiens s’élèvent dans une sorte d’entrelacs formés de références et de figures identitaires que l’on pourrait considérer comme étant antinomiques, mais qui sont envisagées par eux sur un mode complémentaire: l’enracinement et la mobilité, l’agriculture et la course des bois, la vallée du Saint-Laurent et l’appel des grands espaces, la paroisse et la sauvagerie, la France et le Canada, la mère patrie et le nouveau pays, la francité et l’américanité, le repli et l’initiative, la tradition et l’envie d’étrangeté, la fidélité à l’héritage et le désir de refondation, la

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Introduction volonté de s’autonomiser et le refus d’être excentré. Dans le cadre de cette ambivalence ouverte sur le passé et l’avenir, sur le soi et l’autre, et sur l’ici et l’ailleurs, les Canadiens se fabriquent une identité qui forme la base d’une autoreprésentation qui n’a pas disparu chez une majorité de Québécois aujourd’hui. [12–13; On the question of identity, French Canadians stand in a sort of interlacing area formed of identitary references and figures that could be considered contradictory but are seen by them in a complementary mode: entrenchment and mobility, agriculture and roaming the woods, the Saint Lawrence valley and the call of vast spaces, the parish and the wilderness, France and Canada, the motherland and the new world, Frenchness and Americanness, withdrawal and initiative, tradition and difference, faithfulness to heritage and the desire for revision, the will to become autonomous and the refusal to be excluded. In the framework of this ambivalence open to the past and the future, the self and the other, and the here and the elsewhere, French Canadians construct an identity that forms the basis for a self-representation that has not disappeared today for a majority of Quebecois.]

Of the eleven sets of contradictory pairings proposed by Létourneau, the first six share a common denominator – the landscape – and can, with some nudging, be reduced to an overall opposition between culture and nature, as in ‘la paroisse et la sauvagerie.’ The remaining five can also be approached using the notion of cultural doubling proposed by Dumont.9 Thus, the dichotomy of nature and culture and the dichotomy of culture itself (issues at the core of this book) may provide much more than convenient ways of looking at landscape; these seeming contradictions may well constitute fundamental traits of the FrenchCanadian identity. Furthermore, the impulse for the ‘self-representation’ of this conflicted identity referred to by Létourneau may explain the significance of ‘self-reference’ in Quebec literature and painting, another key component of our study. Literature and Painting Each chapter of this book explores a set of texts from a given period in tandem with related paintings, in the hope that by seeing them together we may better visualize the literary description and better understand the ideological import of the visual imagery. Moreover, a comparative, interdisciplinary approach fosters an overall perspective that goes beyond the concerns of a given work, artist, or genre to bring into focus

Introduction

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broader issues like identity and commemoration. Furthermore, the significance of landscape representation to both these issues might go unnoticed in a painting since landscape is a principal genre in visual imagery; when it assumes a major place in a literary work, however, when the visual intrudes on the verbal medium, when descriptive language interrupts the narrative flow, it then becomes more striking and causes us to stop and question its function and thus the messages it brings into play.10 In short, by looking at literature and painting together, we can go beyond what is ‘literary’ or ‘painterly’ to get at what is, for example, ‘natural’ or ‘cultural.’ Ultimately, of course, the question of the kinship of the arts is not determined by the critic, the historian, the reader, or the spectator, but by the artist; in this regard, the position of the songwriter Gilles Vigneault (chapter ten), for example, is unequivocal: ‘Aucun art ne fait son chemin seul. Les tableaux suspendus tout autour de vous sont en rapport direct avec la littérature, la sculpture, la peinture, la chanson et toutes les manifestations artistiques de leur époque.’ (No art form makes its way alone. The paintings hanging all around you have a direct relationship with the literature, the sculpture, the painting, the song, and all the artistic manifestations of their time.)11 In literature, tactics like narrative framing, multiple voices, progressive focusing, antithetical pairing, and figurative language (from personification and metaphor to symbolism and myth) are mustered to produce verbal images that accommodate and vitalize the contradictory combinations engendered by nature and culture on all levels, from description and character to plot, theme, and ideology. The following example is from Anne Hébert’s 1988 novel, Le premier jardin (The First Garden): Est-ce donc si difficile de faire un jardin, en pleine forêt, et de l’entourer d’une palisade comme un trésor? Le premier homme s’appelait Louis Hébert et la première femme, Marie Rollet. Ils ont semé le premier jardin avec des graines qui venaient de France. Ils ont dessiné le jardin d’après cette idée de jardin, ce souvenir de jardin dans leur tête, et ça ressemblait à s’y méprendre à un jardin de France, jeté dans la forêt du Nouveau Monde. Des carottes, des salades, des poireaux, des choux bien alignés, en rangs serrés, tirés au cordeau, parmi la sauvagerie de la terre tout alentour. Quand le pommier, ramené d’Acadie par M. de Mons, et transplanté, a enfin donné des fruits, c’est devenu le premier de tous les jardins du monde, avec Adam et Ève devant le pommier. Toute l’histoire du monde s’est mise à recommencer à cause d’un homme et d’une femme plantés en

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Introduction terre nouvelle. [76–7; Is it so difficult then to make a garden in the middle of the forest and to surround it with a palisade like a treasure-trove? The first man was called Louis Hébert, the first woman Marie Rollet. They sowed the first garden with seeds that came from France. They laid out the garden according to the notion of a garden, the memory of a garden, that they carried in their heads, and it was almost indistinguishable from a garden in France, flung into a forest in the New World. Carrots, lettuces, leeks, cabbages, all in a straight line, in serried ranks along a taut cord, amid the wild earth all around. When the apple tree brought here from Acadia by Monsieur de Mons and transplanted finally yielded its fruit, it became the first of all gardens in the world, with Adam and Eve standing before the Tree. The whole history of the world was starting afresh because of a man and a woman planted in this new earth. (59–60)]

Replete with echoes of the novel’s title (Le premier jardin) and rendered in incantatory rhythm, the passage is recounted by a third-person narrator, but the voices are clearly those of the main characters, Flora (an aging actress) and Raphaël (a history student), which emerge through free, indirect discourse, detectable, for instance, in the use of the present tense, the casual expression (‘then’), and the question mark in the first sentence. The text is structured by a series of contrasts, primarily culture (‘garden’) and nature (‘forest’), but also man and woman, and France and the New World. This ‘first garden,’ a place that is enclosed (‘with a fence’) and ordered (‘in tight ranks’), surrounded by vast and menacing space (‘within the wilderness all around’), and cast as a cultural icon when compared to a ‘treasure,’ becomes a symbol of French heritage through agriculture (seeds) and culture (memory) and indeed of Western civilization when grafted onto the myth of the Garden of Eden. Finally, humanity itself becomes part of the garden, as a man and a woman are metaphorically ‘planted’ in a new world, a situation applicable not only to Adam and Eve, but also to Louis Hébert and Marie Rollet (two of New France’s first habitants in the early seventeenth century), and especially to Flora and Raphaël as their story unfolds against the background of their biblical and historical ancestors. The novel resonates on many levels, from the mythological, to the national, to the personal, all involving the notions of natural and cultural origins. In painting, techniques like centred composition, interlocking spaces, grids of lines, geometrical forms, clusters of colour, and heavy texture conspire to bring far ground into foreground, privileging the picture plane, which is then mobilized to harmonize seemingly disparate visual

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entities, from objects and human figures to natural spaces and cultural places, into a unified yet dynamic whole; that is, an image. Consider, for example, Clarence Gagnon’s Crépuscule sur la Côte-Nord, 1924 (plate 1). Here, instead of retreating into the background, the land mass of the north coast, the very emblem of wilderness, is brought forward towards the village, itself on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River, by an elevated viewpoint, which flattens space, and by the intensity of colour and sharpness of focus, which negate notions of perspective and distance. From its proximate position on the frontal plane, the north coast is juxtaposed yet harmonized with the farm buildings through the uniform lighting of twilight, the repetition of the colour blue, and the ragged line of houses matching that of the mountain range. The precarious position of the settlement, perched between the rugged shoreline and the rocky terrain in the foreground, perhaps suggests, as it does in so many examples from Quebec fiction (including works illustrated by Gagnon, as we see in chapter six), the fragility of civilization, while the looming north coast represents the ever-present danger yet lure of the wilderness: ‘patrie de l’imaginaire, porteur des mythes les plus fous’ (36; land of the imaginary, bearer of the wildest myths), as the film-maker Bruno Boulianne puts it in his essay ‘L’appel du Nord.’12 The struggle of competing elements – culture and nature – seems to have reached, here, for the moment, an entente cordiale where both coexist peacefully in a state of dynamic interplay. Landscape Representation Following this introduction, a series of ten chapters traces the evolution of landscape representation in Quebec from the writings of its earliest explorers to a song, a short story, and a collection of novellas by three of its most popular current authors; in all cases major literary works are paired with prominent paintings on the basis of period, topic, technique, and often direct influence (illustrations).13 The conclusion brings together the most recurrent images (such as the garden and the tree) and the themes they generate (like paradise lost) in order to return to the elusive issue of national identity, the pursuit of which few nations have engaged in more persistently than has Quebec. My main contention in this book is that this arduous and ardent quest for identity is often, even primarily, staged within the landscape, where various sets of contrasting icons, those representing nature and those embodying culture(s), can be combined and juxtaposed in close proximity in the

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Introduction

same image.14 Esther Trépanier, current director of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, has termed landscape representation in Quebec ‘un genre aux multiples enjeux’ (a genre of multiple issues).15 Indeed, the landscape (be it rendered by visual or verbal imagery) not only reflects its social and aesthetic context, it also raises – in the triple sense of bringing forth, carrying along, and elevating – numerous issues, including the fundamental question of identity, at the core of the investigation we are about to undertake.

Chapter One

The French Heritage: From Utopia to Eden

In attempting to determine the distinctive characteristics of landscape representation in the literature and painting of Quebec, it seems logical to begin with asking how its founding fathers saw the new continent. Fortunately, Jacques Cartier, the first European to explore the interior of Canada in the sixteenth century,1 and Samuel de Champlain, the first to settle it in the seventeenth century, are both prolific describers of the landscape. When François-Xavier Garneau, Canada’s first native-born historian, retraces their voyages in his Histoire du Canada in the mid-nineteenth century, he provides us with a unique opportunity not only to observe common points, which may suggest a French heritage, but also to discern the differences that may define the native French-Canadian perspective. In Pierre de Grandpré’s three-volume Histoire de la littérature française du Québec, Claude Galarneau attributes the French heritage to both mental structures – ‘Ce que les Français ont apporté d’intact … c’était leurs structures mentales’ (36; What the French brought, unaltered, … were their mental structures) – and direct communication: ‘Non seulement cette culture n’a jamais cessé de nous imprégner, mais encore elle s’est faite de plus en plus dense à proportion de la facilité des moyens de communication.’ (40; Not only did this culture never cease to impregnate us, but also it became more and more dense in proportion to increasingly easy means of communication.) Whether visual heritage is, in fact, a matter of direct influence or of inherent cultural ways of viewing (perceptual schemata), the essential point of this study is to seek the main common characteristics of viewing and depicting the landscape, the resulting relationships between nature and culture, and the implications for the question of national identity. But, whatever the

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sources and modes of this heritage, what were the French mental structures prevalent at the time of Cartier and Champlain? While most historians readily characterize the European Renaissance (extending from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century) as an era of discovery – intellectual, artistic, scientific, and geographic – the geographer Luc Bureau argues that, in addition, there was a central ideological value (or mental structure): ‘S’il existe une aspiration qui caractérise le monde intellectuel de la Renaissance, c’est bien la recherche de l’unité.’ (107; If there exists a single aspiration that characterizes the intellectual world of the Renaissance, it is truly the quest for unity.) Bureau calls this trait ‘utopian,’ describes it as a geometric vision imposed on geographic space, identifies it as a primary motive in the colonization of the Americas, and contends that its traces still persist in the landscape: La foi commune en la raison humaine capable de commander la nature, l’idée qu’une loi unique organise tous les phénomènes de l’univers, la possibilité offerte à l’homme d’ordonner le monde selon un plan préexistant, se fusionnèrent alors pour faire de l’espace un simple prétexte à l’exercice d’un pouvoir aux ambitions universelles. Au particularisme des aménagements spatiaux précolombiens devait donc succéder une stratégie d’uniformisation déconcertante dont sont toujours témoins les paysages américains contemporains.’ [108; The common faith in a human reason capable of commanding nature, the idea that a single law governs all the universe’s phenomena, the possibility offered to man to order the world according to a pre-existent plan, all fused together to make of space no more than a pretext for the exercise of a power with universal pretensions. The particularities of pre-Columbian spatial organization thus had to yield to a disconcerting strategy of uniformization to which contemporary American landscapes still bear witness.]

In the terms of our study, the Renaissance vision of space involves the domination of nature (‘commander la nature’) by culture (‘la raison humaine’),2 and indeed, Bureau bases the overall organization of his fascinating book, Entre l’éden et l’utopie: Les fondements imaginaires de l’espace québécois, on precisely this distinction: the myth of Eden is based on nature – ‘L’Éden est le pays de la nature originelle, des forces insoumises, des forêts excessives et indisciplinées’ (12; Eden is the land of original nature, of untamed forces, of vast, uncontrolled forests) – the myth of Utopia is founded on culture: ‘L’Utopie est le domaine de la

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culture, de l’organisation, des forêts en quinconce, des champs rectangulaires et bien alignés.’ (12; Utopia is the domain of culture, of organization, of forests in staggered rows, of rectangular, well-aligned fields.) For Bureau, it is the interplay of these two myths that shapes the perception and organization of space in Quebec, beginning in the Renaissance with the ‘utopian’ vision of Cartier and Champlain. Cartier: The French Vision Jacques Cartier, the first European to explore the interior of Canada, may also be considered legitimately as the first to have ‘painted’ it. His frequent, detailed descriptions are invariably accompanied by hyperbolic assessments of the aesthetic ‘beauty’ of the landscape, as Michel Bideaux notes (74). Furthermore, Cartier sees and describes persistent characteristics of the landscape, which combine to define its beauty, leading Bideaux to conclude that ‘pour le découvreur, un beau pays est donc une terre plane, couverte de hautes forêts bordées de prairies naturelles. N’est-ce pas là, avec en plus l’exubérance et la virginité d’un continent nouveau, le pays même de Cartier dans l’ouest de la France?’ (75; for the discoverer, beautiful land is thus land that is flat, covered in lofty forests bordered by natural meadows. Isn’t that, along with the exuberance and virginity of a new continent, the land of Cartier himself in western France?) More than a mere memory of Cartier’s homeland, however, the landscape descriptions reveal a consistent set of embedded ideological values, on one level seemingly aesthetic, but on a more profound level, ultimately utilitarian and highly ‘utopian.’ During his first voyage of 1534, Cartier primarily explored the coast surrounding the gulf of the Saint Lawrence River. As an example of his assessment of the landscape, consider his description (from his shipboard viewpoint in the Baie des Chaleurs) of the coastline to the south (now New Brunswick) and to the north (now the Gaspé Peninsula region of Quebec): Et la terre vers le sud de ladite baie est aussi belle et bonne terre, labourable et pleine d’aussi belles campagnes et prairies que nous ayons vues, et unie comme un étang. Et celle vers le nord est une terre haute à montagnes, toute pleine d’arbres de haute futaie, de plusieurs sortes; et entre autres, il y a plusieurs cèdres et sapins, aussi beaux qu’il soit possible de voir, pour faire des mâts, suffisants pour mâter des navires de trois cents

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Literature and Painting in Quebec tonneaux et plus; en laquelle nous ne vîmes pas un seul lieu vide de bois, sauf en deux lieux de basses terres, où il y avait des prairies et des étangs très beaux. [137; The land to the south of this bay is as beautiful and as good, as arable and as full of beautiful fields and meadows, as we have ever seen, and level like the surface of a pond. And the land to the north is a high mountainous terrain, completely covered with all sorts of lofty trees; and among other types are many cedars and spruces, as beautiful as possible to see, capable of making masts for ships of 300 tons or more; here we did not see a single place clear of woods, except in two low places, where there were meadows and very beautiful ponds.]

Here we see a seemingly aesthetic dimension emerge through the repetition of the adjective ‘beau’ (‘belle … belles … beaux’), in two cases fitting the hyperbolic formula identified by Bideaux: ‘aussi belles ... que nous ayons vues ... aussi beaux qu’il soit possible de voir.’ The landscape also has a clear duality marked by the uniformity of the flat lowlands to the south and the mountainous terrain to the north, which is more rugged in appearance. Upon further inspection, however, we note that the overall ‘beauty’ of the lowland is due to its potential for cultivation (‘labourable’), a factor of its uniformity (‘unie’), which is described through comparison with a familiar (that is, European) phenomenon (‘comme un étang’). Similarly, the tall timber is ‘beautiful’ in terms of its potential use in the production of huge masts for seagoing vessels (‘pour faire des mâts’). Rather than being sensitive to the expansive space and forested grandeur of the landscape to the north, Cartier scans it for scattered ‘places’ that are lowlands and thus ‘beautiful’ because they are arable, like their counterparts to the south. In no case is Cartier sensitive to the potential aesthetic beauty that could be (and would be centuries later) derived from the juxtaposition of the two radically different landscapes. In short, Cartier sees nature entirely in terms of culture, especially shipbuilding and agriculture, the very tools of discovery and colonization.3 As one scans Cartier’s landscape descriptions, one continues to find this familiar pattern of beauty defined in terms of uniformity and thus arability, reinforced by comparability to European scenery. In his second voyage of 1535–6, he penetrates inland up the Saint Lawrence valley, the first European to do so. Again, beauty is linked to culture: he describes the île de Bacchus (the île d’Orléans) as ‘très belle à voir et unie, mais elle est pleine de bois, sans aucun labourage’ (182; very beautiful to see and flat, but it is covered in woods, with no trace of

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cultivation), and Stadaconé (Quebec) is seen as ‘aussi bonne terre qu’il soit possible de voir, et bien fructifiante, pleine de très beaux arbres de la même nature et sorte qu’en France’ (181; as beautiful a land as it is possible to see, and highly fertile, covered with very beautiful trees of the same nature and type as in France). In assessing Cartier’s penchant for describing the New World landscape through analogies to France, Paul Perron concludes, in terms most relevant to our study, that ‘nature is transformed into culture through metaphor and simile’ (54).4 In his third voyage of 1541, which replicates the route of the second, Cartier’s rapt descriptions of the natural landscape continue to qualify beauty as ‘uniform’ and ready for cultivation. At Hochelaga (Montreal), for example, Cartier wrote: ‘Nous commençâmes à trouver les terres labourées et belles’ (197; We began to find land that was cultivated and beautiful), and he noted that the view from Mount Royal revealed ‘la terre labourable la plus belle qu’il soit possible de voir, unie et plate’ (204; the most beautiful arable land that it is possible to see, uniform and level). This latter example is followed by a rare description of the vastness of North American space – ‘et nous voyions ce fleuve [the Saint Lawrence River] aussi loin que l’on pouvait regarder, grand, large et spacieux, qui allait au sud-ouest et passait auprès de trois belles montagnes rondes’ (204–5; and we could follow this river as far as one could see, large, wide, and spacious, going towards the southwest and passing three beautiful round mountains), although the adjective ‘beautiful’ is reserved for those particular mountains that have the good grace to appear sculpted in familiar, regular geometric shapes (‘rondes’). In commenting on the rarity of such a panoramic view accompanied by what seems an aesthetic appreciation, Réal Ouellet also notes that it reveals Cartier’s domination of space and his hopes of finding a passage to the Far East, via the West (95). A 1556 engraving, ‘La Terra de Hochelaga nella Nova Francia,’ by Jacopo (aka Giacomo) Gastaldi in Ramusio’s Italian edition of Cartier’s travels, Delle Navigationi et viaggi, depicts Cartier’s account of his visit to the village of Hochelaga, as seen in the human figures to the lower left (marked S in figure 1.1). The engraving also emphasizes the fertility of the landscape,5 while its flatness is enhanced by the elevated perspective, suggestive perhaps of Cartier’s view from Mount Royal (featured in a reduced manner at the middle left). The geometrical forms of the landscape match those of the village in the centre, depicted as a perfect circle. In an enlightening analysis of this famous engraving, FrançoisMarc Gagnon and Denise Petel demonstrate that, in fact, the circular

1.1 Jacopo Gastaldi. La Terra de Hochelaga nella Nova Francia, 1556. Illustration in Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Delle Navigationi et viaggi, vol 3 (Venice: Nella stamperia Giunti, 1563–83), 446–7.

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configuration conforms not only to the geometrical tastes of Renaissance Europe but also to its military strategies, where firearms dictated a certain organization of defence (200–1). Rather than constituting an accurate ethnographic document, the engraving, like Cartier’s text, imposes a European vision, which Gagnon and Petel also characterize as ‘utopian’: ‘en réalité, il [le plan] est un bon exemple d’urbanisme utopique typique de la Renaissance’ (201, see also 203; in reality, the plan is a good example of utopian urbanism, typical of the Renaissance). Cartier himself not only evaluates the landscape frequently in terms of its favourable comparison with French phenomena,6 but he also tends to see landforms in terms of geometrical shapes (‘en manière de triangle’ [136; like a triangle], ‘en manière de demi-cercle’ [149; like a semicircle]) and even familiar European architectural structures: ‘Nous trouvâmes des terres à montagne très hautes et sauvages; parmi lesquelles il y en a une paraissant être une grange, et pour ce nous nommâmes ce lieu les monts des Granges.’ (124; We found a region of very high, rugged mountains, among which there was one that resembled a barn, so we named this area the Barn Mountains.) In this case, he turns away from the large, wild mountains to focus on those with a more familiar shape, which he then names accordingly. For Cartier, naming natural features, especially after Roman Catholic saints, seems to be not only a way of organizing the landmass into reference points for cartographic purposes but also of coping with its strangeness and appropriating it in terms of European language and culture. As Roland LeHuenen notes, ‘Le site décrit est toujours nommé, geste d’appropriation par excellence, et dans la majeure partie des cas cet acte de nomination est aussi un acte de baptême, je veux dire qu’il s’effectue dans un registre hagiographique.’ (32; The site described is always named, the ultimate gesture of appropriation, and in most cases this act of naming is also an act of baptism, since it occurs in a hagiographic register.)7 The ultimate manner of controlling the landscape, however, for future reference as well as for present possession, is to ‘plant’ a cross on a prominent point (a European custom that Cartier practises just before the end of each of his first two voyages),8 as in the following example from the first voyage, where the French are closely observed by several ‘sauvages’: Nous fîmes faire une croix de trente pieds de haut, qui fut faite devant plusieurs d’entre eux, sur la pointe de l’entrée dudit havre, sous le croisillon de

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Here European ‘culture,’ in the form of the cross, a religious symbol, itself enhanced by a French political symbol (‘trois fleurs de lys’) and linguistic symbols (the written language in capital letters), is ‘implanted’ on ‘nature’ and in full view of the natural inhabitants (‘devant ... eux’), as Cartier states twice, as if to rub it in. In Cartier’s recounting of the objections of the native ‘capitaine’ (148), Donnacona, who by signs ‘nous montrait la terre, tout autour de nous, comme s’il eût voulu dire que toute la terre était à lui, et que nous ne devions pas planter ladite croix sans sa permission’ (148; showed us the land, all around us, as if he wanted to say that all the land was his, and that we should not have planted that cross without his permission), we clearly detect a fundamental difference in the conception of the landscape: Cartier was focused on a specific place (‘pointe’) defined by cultural icons, Donnacona was concerned with the vast surrounding space of nature (‘toute la terre’). Cartier managed, nonetheless, to impose his European vision and to appease the chief by giving him a metal hatchet and taking two of his sons to Europe. Ever resourceful and always persistent, Cartier has also become an adept reader of ‘signs,’ both natural and human (in his description of his first encounter with natives, for example, the word ‘signes’ appears eight times in three pages, 139–41), a prerequisite on this new continent. The Europeans are anxious to understand the unfamiliar environment, but verbal communication with the natives is impossible until Donnacona’s two sons return on the second voyage and serve as interpreters. Even then, the deciphering of pictorial and natural signs remains a necessity in the New World and a key to understanding its future writing and painting (see Perron, 16). Now that the cross, the ultimate symbol of Christian culture, has been ‘planted’ on the North American landscape, Cartier expresses to

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King François I, in a dedication to the second voyage, his hope to ‘sow’ and ‘plant’ the Christian faith on the North American people, just as had happened in the Holy Land: ‘Notre très sainte foi a été semée et plantée en la Terre Sainte’ (159). The French explorer had already noted in his previous voyage that certain ‘bandes’ would be ripe for converting: ‘Nous vîmes que ce sont des gens qui seraient faciles à convertir, qui vont d’un lieu à l’autre’ (142; We saw that these were people who would be easy to convert, going from one place to another), a perception based on their nomadic nature, lacking a ‘place’ and thus a ‘culture’ of their own. During the second visit, he finds another group similarly ripe for colonizing and asks (his) God’s blessing for the eventual accomplishment of this task: ‘De ce que nous avons connu et pu comprendre de ce peuple, il me semble qu’il serait aisé à dompter, de la façon et manière que l’on voudrait. Dieu, dans sa sainte miséricorde, y veuille porter son regard. Amen.’ (215; From what we have learned and understood about these people, it seems to me that they would be easily tamed, however one wanted. May God, in His holy mercy, turn His attention to this task. Amen.) In short, just as Cartier tends to see the North American landscape in terms of its capacity for being cultivated, he also perceives its natives as easy to convert and colonize; both the land and its people are ready to bear the stamp of European civilization. That Cartier sees nature in purely utilitarian terms is hardly surprising, since he was a navigator writing for a European audience that he was determined to convince of the value of his discoveries; however, the specific format of his descriptions, focusing on the uniform ‘place’ detached and distinguished from the vast (and, for him, less interesting if not outright ugly) ‘space’ of the surrounding wilderness, provides a concrete starting point, a ‘récit fondateur’ (Allard, 30) or ‘Ur narrative’ (Perron, 42) and, from our perspective, a ‘founding depiction’ or ‘ur-description’ from which to explore his ‘descendants.’ Champlain: The French Imprint Samuel de Champlain’s descriptions of the North American landscape are remarkably similar to Cartier’s, an influence that may be considered as ‘direct’ (he had read Cartier carefully, replicated his route inland up the Saint Lawrence River, and carried his compatriot’s text with him) or ‘indirect’ (both men see in a culturally conditioned manner that is typically ‘French’ and ‘utopian’). Whatever the source, the pattern is unmistakable, beginning with the linking of beauty and utility. Consider

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Champlain’s description of the countryside surrounding the île d’Orléans, just northeast of Quebec City, during his 1608 voyage: Ce lieu est le commencement du beau et bon pays de la grande rivière, où il y a depuis son entrée 120 lieues. Au bout de l’île, il y a un torrent d’eau du côté du nord qui vient d’un lac qui est a quelques dix lieues dedans les terres et qui descend de dessus une côte qui a près de 25 toises de haut, audessus de laquelle la terre est unie et plaisante à voir, bien que dans le pays on voie de hautes montagnes qui paraissent être éloignées de 15 à 20 lieues. [129; This place marks the beginning of the beautiful and good land of the great river, 120 leagues from our entry point. Opposite the end of the island, there is a waterfall on the [river’s] north shore, coming from a lake about ten leagues inland and falling from a hill almost 25 toises high, above which the land is uniform and pleasant to see, although in the area one sees high mountains that appear to be 15 to 20 leagues away.]9

As with Cartier’s evaluations, for Champlain beauty (‘beau,’ ‘plaisante à voir’) is attributed to the uniform landscape (‘unie’) rather than to the waterfall (la chute de Montmorency, the highest in North America) or to the mountains (the Laurentians), whose presence, on the contrary, threatens to disrupt the visual pleasure (‘plaisante à voir, bien que dans le pays on voie de hautes montagnes’). Again, the scene is governed by a contrast between place (‘ce lieu’) and vast space (‘éloignées’), but only the former is considered beautiful, and Champlain adds a precise dimension of mathematical measurement to his description, much as Cartier favours geometrical form. The same aesthetic criteria typical of Cartier’s vision hold just as true for Champlain, who describes the beauty of the countryside surrounding Quebec City (which he founded as a European settlement in 1608) in terms of its fertility and familiarity: ‘Pour ce qui est du pays, il est beau et plaisant, et apporte toutes sortes de grains et graines à maturité, y ayant toutes les espèces d’arbres que nous avons en nos forêts par deça.’ (149; As for the land, it is beautiful and pleasant, and brings all sorts of seeds to maturity, having nearby all the species of trees that we have in our forests.) Similarly, the landscape of the rivière des Iroquois (now the Richelieu River on the south bank of the Saint Lawrence River) is also described as beautiful (‘beau’) because of its uniformity (‘uni’) and despite its waterfalls and woodlands: ‘Après que nous eûmes passé le saut, ce qui ne fut pas sans peine, tous les sauvages qui étaient allés par terre, par un chemin assez beau et pays uni, bien qu’il y ait quantité

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de bois, se rembarquèrent dans leurs canots.’ (160; After we had passed the rapids, not without difficulty, all the natives who had gone by land, taking a quite beautiful path through uniform land despite its many woods, embarked again in their canoes.) In a later voyage, in 1611, during which he considers the possibility of founding a European settlement at Montreal, he again sees the site’s beauty in terms of its utility, not only for cultivation but also for habitation: ‘Ayant ... trouvé ce lieu un des plus beaux qui fût en cette rivière, je fis aussitôt couper et défricher le bois de ladite place Royale pour la rendre unie et prête à bâtir.’ (211; Having ... found this place one of the most beautiful on the river, I immediately had the woods cut and cleared on the said Place Royale to make it uniform and fit for construction.) Champlain’s descriptions, like Cartier’s, invariably link beauty to arability (‘les terres semblent être propres à être cultivées’ [20; the land seems fit for cultivation])10 – all the more so if the land has been cleared of trees (‘le terroir est des plus beaux et il y a quinze ou vingt arpents de terre défrichée.’ [30; the area is among the most beautiful and there are fifteen or twenty acres of cleared land]) – but Champlain is particularly struck by habitability (‘ce lieu était le plus propre et plaisant pour habiter que nous eussions vu’ [25; this place was the most fit and pleasant for living that we had seen]). In concluding his discussion of the link between beauty and utility for Champlain, Paolo Carile contrasts this vision with an Edenic view of untamed nature in the same sense that Bureau uses the term: ‘La beauté de la nature naîtrait donc, pour Champlain, de l’action humaine et ne serait pas l’état édenique d’un territoire incontaminé.’ (87; The beauty of nature for Champlain would thus stem from human action and would not be an Edenic state of uncontaminated territory.) Conversely, landscapes that are not arable or habitable are seen as ugly, including the valley of the Saguenay River, widely regarded today as among the most picturesque areas in all Quebec due to its rugged woods and rock formations, which Champlain denigrates – ‘Toute la terre que j’y ai vue, ce ne sont que montagnes et promontoires de rochers, la plupart couverts de sapins et bouleaux: terre fort déplaisante, tant d’un côté que de l’autre’ (126; All the land I saw was only mountains and rocky headlands, mostly covered with firs and birches: a most unpleasant land, on one side and the other) – and the Saint Lawrence River valley east of Quebec City, which includes the Charlevoix region, a future haven for landscape painters but distasteful for Champlain: ‘Toute cette côte, tant du Nord que du Sud, depuis Tadoussac jusqu’à l’île d’Orléans, est une terre montueuse et fort mauvaise, où il n’y a que

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des pins, sapins et bouleaux, et des rochers très mauvais, où on ne saurait aller en la plupart de ces endroits.’ (129; The entire coastline, north and south, from Tadoussac to the île d’Orléans, is hilly land and very bad at that, with only pines, firs, and birches, and very bad rocks, where one wouldn’t want to go for the most part.) Champlain’s description amply confirms Bureau’s judgment that ‘la Renaissance, par son goût de la nature dénaturée, fit également peu de place aux forêts et aux montagnes, symboles mêmes de la nature insouciante et indomptée’ (956; the Renaissance, by its taste for denatured nature, also makes little time for forests and mountains, the very symbols of uncaring and untamed nature).11 Champlain’s and his contemporaries’ tastes in landscape may seem anathema to today’s painters, and yet, as we shall verify in numerous cases, his vision forms an integral part of Quebec’s heritage. In addition to his utilitarian evaluation of the landscape, when Champlain observes the ‘sauvages,’ he is intensely interested in their agricultural practices and products as well as their housing. Indeed, Champlain sees agriculture as the ultimate sign of culture, not unlike his friend from his earlier Acadian adventures, Marc Lescarbot: ‘La culture de la terre, le plus innocent de tous les exercices corporeals, et que je veux appeler le plus noble … en la Nouvelle-France, il faut ramener le siècle d’or … afin d’inviter chacun à bien cultiver son champs, puisque la terre se présente librement à ceux qui n’en ont point.’ (813– 15; Cultivation of the land, the most innocent of all corporeal exercises, and which I see as the most noble … in New France, one must bring back the golden age … and invite everyone to cultivate his fields, since the land offers itself freely to those who have none.) From a similar ideological standpoint, here regarding the less advanced bands among the natives, Champlain expresses the desire to ‘habiter leur terre et leur montrer comment la cultiver afin qu’ils ne traînassent plus une vie aussi misérable que celle qu’ils menaient’ (39; inhabit their land and show them how to cultivate it so they no longer drag out as miserable a life as they have been leading). Even more than Cartier before him, Champlain, who has far greater interaction with various First Nations, becomes adept at reading signs, not only gestures, including purposely misleading ones, which he nonetheless manages to decipher (100–1), but also smoke signals, objects, and even tracks: ‘Pour découvrir … quelque marque ou signal par où aient passé leurs ennemis ou leurs amis, qu’ils connaissent grâce à certaines marques que leurs chefs se donnent d’une nation à l’autre, qui ne sont toujours semblables’ (161–2; to discover … some mark or signal

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where their enemies or friends had passed, which they recognize from certain marks that the chiefs provide from one nation to another, which are not always similar). On at least two occasions, Champlain even convinces Amerindians to aid him in drawing primitive maps in order to assist him in locating different places and thus establishes with them a form of pictorial communication (55, 218). Champlain was himself a highly accomplished cartographer, which Jeffrey Peters sees as the logical outcome of the desire to dominate the landscape already present in his text: ‘Champlain’s constant search for the “smooth,” the “flat,” and the “unified” within the rugged landscape of “la Nouvelle-France,” as well as his persistent attempts to reduce cultural difference and plurality, dramatizes the cartographic gesture that defines his discursive project’ (99). But Champlain did not just map the new land, he also occupied it, and it is in fact his active influence on the natives and on the landscape that ultimately distinguishes him from Cartier. On several occasions he successfully leads bands composed of Hurons, Algonquins, and Montagnais, his allies for future trading purposes, into war against their bitter foe, the Iroquois. Champlain also actively cultivates the land and could well be considered creator of the ‘first garden’ in Quebec, a title conferred on Louis Hébert by Anne Hébert (chapter nine). At Quebec City, for example, Champlain writes: ‘Pendant que les charpentiers, scieurs d’ais et d’autres ouvriers travaillaient à notre logement, je fis mettre tout le reste à défricher autour de notre habitation, afin de faire des jardinages pour y semer des grains et graines pour voir comment le tout succèderait, d’autant que la terre paraissait fort bonne.’ (140; While the carpenters, sawyers and other workers were working on our lodging, I had the rest clear the land around our dwelling to make gardens for sowing various seeds to see how they would do, all the more so since the land appeared very good.) Although he ‘plants’ a cross on a gravesite (97) and ‘plants’ the head of a would-be traitor on a pole outside the Quebec settlement (135), while expressing his desire to ‘plant the Christian faith’ (15), Champlain is much more likely to plant seeds in a garden: ‘J’y semai quelques graines qui profitèrent bien et j’y prenais un singulier plaisir, mais auparavant il avait bien fallu travailler.’ (73; I sowed a few seeds that are doing well, which gave me a distinct pleasure, but it took a lot of work prior to that.) And the result is a magnificent garden that imposes order on nature in the French style, with ‘fossés pleins d’eau’ (ditches full of water), ‘un petit reservoir’ (a little pool), ‘une petite écluse’ (a small lock), and even ‘un cabinet avec de

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beaux arbres pour y aller prendre de la fraîcheur’ (73; a den with beautiful trees to go and take fresh air)! Like Cartier before him, Champlain sees the landscape in terms of geometrical forms – ‘cette île de Cap Breton est de forme triangulaire’ (116; this island of Cape Breton is triangular in shape) – but he goes much further in imposing architecture on the landscape, especially in his famous habitations. Champlain’s habitation at Quebec City, for example, is a model of European ‘place’ in its symmetrical organization of ‘space’: Je fis continuer notre logement qui était de trois corps de logis à deux étages. Chacun contenait trois toises de long et deux et demie de large. Le magasin avait six toises de long et trois de large, avec une belle cave de six pieds de haut. Tout autour de nos logements, je fis faire une galerie pardehors au second étage, qui était fort commode, avec des fossés de 15 pieds de large et six de profondeur, et au-dehors des fossés, je fis plusieurs pointes d’éperons qui enfermaient une partie du logement, là où nous mîmes nos pièces de canon, et devant le bâtiment, il y a une place de quatre toises de large et six ou sept de long, qui donne sur le bord de la rivière. Autour du logement, il y a des jardins qui sont très bons, et une place du côté du Septentrion qui a quelque cent ou cent vingt pas de long, 50 ou 60 de large. [136; I continued to have work done on our lodging, which had three main two-story buildings. Each was three toises in length and two and a half in width. The store room was six toises in length and three in width, with a fine cellar six feet high. All around our lodgings, I had an outdoor balcony constructed on the second floor, which was very handy, and ditches 15 feet wide and 6 feet deep; and beyond the ditches, I put several defence points, which enclosed part of the lodgings and served as placements for our canons, and in front of the building, there’s a square four toises in width and six or seven in length, which looks out on the river bank. Around the lodgings, there are very good gardens, and a square to the north which is about 100 or 120 paces in length by 50 or 60 in width.]

Its mathematical proportions, uniformity (‘chacun contenait’), and especially concentricity (‘tout autour,’ ‘enfermaient,’ ‘autour de’) are obviously due to military reasons, as is evident in the engraving L’Habitation de Québec, presumably based on Champlain’s sketches (Morisset, 11), which accompanies the text in the 1613 edition (figure 1.2): In the engraving, as in Champlain’s writings, culture dominates nature, which is flattened and literally squeezed out of the picture by its very composition, which highlights place by reducing surrounding

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1.2 Samuel de Champlain, L’Habitation de Québec, 1613. Illustration in Les Voyages du sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois, capitaine ordinaire pour le Roy, en la marine (Paris: Jean Berjon, 1613), 187.

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space. For Champlain, the only good tree is a felled one, and the engraver proudly includes the stumps in his depiction of an earlier habitation at Port Royal in what is now Nova Scotia, a tangible symbol of the subordination of nature by culture (235). As Bureau concludes, ‘Militaire ... et géographe de surcroît! Un tel alliage de vertus en un seul homme ne pouvait produire qu’un être totalement dédié à la rectification des erreurs de la nature. La ligne droite, le rectangle, l’angle droit n’existaient pas dans la forêt laurentienne de l’époque. Champlain va s’empresser de les y introduire; il se fera le prodigieux esthéticien de l’espace en le soumettant à l’ordre symétrique et inaltérable d’un clavier de clavecin.’ (29; A military man … and geographer to boot! Such an alliance of virtues in a single man could produce only a person totally dedicated to the rectification of nature’s errors. The straight line, the rectangle, the right angle didn’t exist in the Laurentian forest at that time. Champlain will hasten to introduce them; he will make himself into a prodigious aesthetician of space by submitting it to the symmetrical and inalterable order of a harpsichord keyboard.) Champlain’s obsession with the notion of place extends beyond the garden and the settlement to what he also terms the ‘lieu de sureté’ (secure place) where one can anchor a vessel or, even better, have a private conversation, a place of communication: ‘Le pilote me vint trouver en un jardin que je faisais accommoder, et il me dit qu’il désirait me parler en un lieu secret, où il n’y eût que nous deux. Je lui dit que je le voulais bien. Nous allâmes dans le bois, où il me conta toute l’affaire.’ (132; The pilot came to find me in a garden that I was having prepared, and told me he wanted to speak with me in a secret place, where there would be only the two of us. I told him I was more than willing. We went into the woods, where he recounted the entire affair.) The ‘affair’ is the plot to overthrow Champlain, which had been revealed to the pilot by an informant, who is later brought to the same ‘secure place.’ Champlain can also be considered among the first to foster a ‘site of memory,’ a commemorative place on the North American continent that is linked to the New World’s own history rather than to that of France. Convinced that other Europeans were mistaken in locating Cartier’s initial winter quarters at a place now called Sainte-Croix (the name used by Cartier), Champlain contends that it was a different place, better suited for anchorage (see 137–140). Undertaking ‘exacte recherche’ (140), based on descriptions from Cartier’s travels, Champlain finds a more likely locale near what is now called the Saint-Charles River and indeed uncovers the ruins that confirm and consecrate that place as Cartier’s

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winter quarters.12 In short, it is Cartier’s writings, followed by those of Champlain, that locate, designate, and consecrate this place for posterity, that impose a collective cultural mark, a landmark, on the New World wilderness. Indeed, it is ultimately the text, or the map itself, that becomes a ‘place,’ ‘utopian’ at that, as Peters concludes: ‘Throughout the text, Champlain’s narrative persona envisions the construction of a singular “place” from which “la Nouvelle-France” may be viewed “objectively” and “truthfully” … The map’s totalizing point of view is ultimately utopian. It is an impossible view from and of “nowhere” (ou-topos). The map’s authority as a geographic instrument derives not from any real capacity to communicate its referent, but from its ability to persuade viewers to behave as if it could’ (101). Just as Cartier saw nature in terms of culture, one might say that Champlain transformed nature by culture, creating significant place from meaningless space, hardly surprising, of course, for a man whose declared mission was to settle the new land (13), as later reiterated by King Henri IV himself, in a document quoted by Champlain: ‘Sur l’avis qui nous a été donné par ceux qui sont venus de la Nouvelle-France de la bonté et fertilité des terres dudit pays et que les peuples de celui-ci sont disposés à recevoir la connaissance de Dieu, nous avons résolu de faire continuer l’habitation qui avait été ci-devant commencée audit pays.’ (120; Based on the advice given to us by those who came from New France concerning the goodness and fertility of its lands and that its peoples are disposed to receive knowledge of God, we have resolved to have the residence already begun in said country continue.) This same civilizing mission is well illustrated by one of the first surviving paintings set in the New World, La France apportant la foi aux Hurons de la Nouvelle-France (figure 1.3), painted around 1660 by an anonymous French artist, though sometimes attributed to Frère Luc, aka Claude François.13 If one begins a reading with the figure of France (whose face is that of Anne of Austria, dowager Queen of France from 1643–66 and regent for the future Sun King, Louis XIV, until 1651), as suggested by the painting’s title and promoted by her prominent position, she transfers European values, represented by the ship with coat of arms and flags to the right, through the painting, to the kneeling native in the rugged New World setting to the left, both of which already bear the stamp of French civilization in the form of a fleur-de-lis cape and cross-topped chapels. At the same time the allegorical figure’s gesturing hand leads the eye upward to the vision of the holy family, which reappears in the

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1.3 Anonymous, La France apportant la foi aux Hurons de la Nouvelle-France, fin du 17e siècle. Huile sur toile, 219 x 219 cm. Musée des Ursulines de Québec, Collection du Monastère des Ursulines de Québec / France Bringing Faith to the Hurons of New-France, end of seventeenth century. Oil on canvas, 219 x 219 cm. Musée des Ursulines de Québec, Collection du Monastère des Ursulines de Québec.

painting below, thereby closing the composition vertically, just as the symmetrically placed trees, rocks, and hills close it horizontally, in typical neoclassical fashion. Given the central position of the painting within the painting, one might say that it is art itself that mediates, not only between heaven and earth, but between cultures, whose different

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verbal languages are bridged by visual communication. As Dennis Reid puts it, the canvas ‘represents simply and directly the noblest intentions of the first Europeans in settling the St Lawrence valley, and as directly proclaims the central role that French culture, and particularly painting, would play in the realization of those intentions’ (A Concise History, 4). As the analyses of Gagnon, Lacroix, and Monteyne reveal, however (note 13), the message of the painting is far from simple and direct since, if the natives receive the gifts of culture and religion from the Europeans, the latter, in turn, receive not only moral satisfaction, but also political allegiance and even economic gain, as suggested by the ship to the right, bearing the coat of arms of Guillaume de Bruc, one of the founders of the Compagnie de Morbihan, which began trading operations in Huron territory in 1629.14 At any rate, by its juxtaposition of nature, including river, forest, and mountains in the far ground, with a culturally significant place in the foreground, and by highlighting the role of art itself through the painting within the painting, this work might well be considered the ‘ur-painting’ of the entire Quebec landscape tradition. As for his own ‘civilizing mission,’ Champlain is not only the first European to settle the Saint Lawrence valley, he is also the first to describe four types of place that come to constitute central motifs in Quebec literature and painting: the garden, the habitat, the secret spot, and the memorial, all of which bear witness to the domination of nature by the creation of cultural sites. This rational, utilitarian, ‘utopian’ conception of the landscape embodied in Champlain’s writings, modelled on those of Cartier, culminated in the seventeenth century, according to Bureau, where it is epitomized in France by the Versailles gardens of Le Nôtre (Bureau, 39) and in New France by the orthogonal land demarcation of the seigneurial system (Bureau, 117).15 For Bureau, the utopian concept continued well into the eighteenth century, when it was complemented by an Edenic vision based on untamed nature, which was embodied in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (59) and which began to take hold in Canada in the decades following the British Conquest in 1759 (155–6), to which we now jump in time.16 Garneau: A French-Canadian Perspective In his Histoire du Canada (1845), François-Xavier Garneau, Canada’s first great historian and among its first great literary figures, writing nearly a century after the Conquest, avidly promotes a French-Canadian identity threatened by the British reprisals following the failed patriots’

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rebellions in 1837–8, by the demeaning report of Lord Durham in 1839, which characterized French Canadians as ‘un peuple sans histoire et sans littérature’ (a people without history and without literature), and by the institutionalized repression and assimilation implicit in the Act of Union in 1840.17 Garneau singles out Cartier and Champlain as his country’s most important ancestors, but even in recounting their explorations, his vision of the landscape and the natives differs remarkably from theirs. Consider, for a start, Garneau’s overall description of Canada: ‘Ces contrées si variées, si étendues, si riches en beautés naturelles, et qui portent, pour nous servir des termes d’un auteur célèbre, l’empreinte du grand et du sublime, étaient habitées par de nombreuses tribus nomades qui vivaient de chasse et de pêche.’ (195; These regions, which are so varied, so extensive, so rich in natural beauties, and which, to use the terms of a famous author, bear the imprint of grandeur and the sublime, were inhabited by numerous nomadic tribes, who lived by hunting and fishing.) Unlike Cartier and Champlain, Garneau sees beauty as a natural not cultural phenomenon (‘beautés naturelles’), defined by its variety and vastness (‘si variées, si étendues’) rather than its uniformity. Rather than bearing the ‘imprint’ of civilization, the countryside has its own natural stamp of sublime grandeur (‘l’empreinte du grand et du sublime’), a term borrowed from a ‘great author,’ probably Chateaubriand, but certainly characteristic of ‘Edenic’ not ‘utopian’ vision.18 For Garneau, the most typical natives are those nomads (‘tribus nomades’) who live from hunting and fishing, rather than those of fixed domicile who cultivate the land, the focal point for Champlain. As Garneau follows Cartier’s exploratory voyage of 1535 up the Saint Lawrence River, the historian’s description nonetheless differs markedly from that of his ancestor’s, which was focused on uniformity and utility. In his detailed table of contents, Garneau highlights the ‘beautés naturelles du pays’ (93; the natural beauties of the land), and he subsequently describes the site of Quebec City (formerly Stadaconé) as follows: ‘Cet endroit du Saint-Laurent est, à cause de ses points de vue, l’un des sites les plus grandioses et les plus magnifiques de l’Amérique’ (98; This spot on the Saint Lawrence is, because of its viewing points, one of the most grandiose and magnificent sites in North America). Here the historian remains in the realm of visual aesthetics (‘points de vue’) and sees beauty in terms of grandeur (‘grandioses’), as reiterated in a subsequent description of the same site: ‘Mais à Québec la scène change. Autant la nature est âpre et sauvage sur le bas du fleuve, autant

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elle est ici variée et pittoresque, sans cesser de conserver un caractère de grandeur.’ (98; But at Quebec the scene changes. As much as nature is harsh and wild on the bottom part of the river, here it is that much varied and picturesque.) Once again beauty (‘pittoresque’) is linked to vast space (‘grandeur’), not limited place, and to variety (‘variée’), not uniformity.19 Garneau goes on to quote his friend, the British economist, John McGregor, author of British America,20 whom he deems among the best writers to describe ‘l’Amérique brittanique,’ and who does so here from the perspective of a spectator going upriver: ‘Alors Québec et les beautés sublimes qui l’environnent lui apparaissent tout à coup. Le grand et vaste tableau, qui s’offre à ses regards frappe d’une manière si irrésistible qu’il est rare que ceux qui l’ont vu une fois oublient la majesté de cette scène et l’impression qu’ils en ont recue.’ (99; Then Quebec and the sublime beauties that surround it suddenly appear to him. The grand and vast painting, which offers itself to his eyes, is so strikingly irresistible that rarely do those who have once seen it forget the majesty of this scene and the impression they received from it.) Again the scene is described in visual terms (‘ses regards,’ ‘vu,’ ‘l’impression,’ ‘scène’) that cast artistic beauty in painterly terms as an aesthetic phenomenon, linked to grandeur (‘le grand et vaste tableau’) and based more on imagination than on practicality. Similarly, as Garneau follows Cartier to Montreal (Hochelaga), the historian recognizes the explorer’s obvious concern with agriculture – ‘le pays lui parut propre à la culture’ (101; the land appeared fit for cultivation to him) – but as Garneau describes Cartier’s view from Mount Royal, which we quoted earlier, he dwells on the very vastness that Cartier had sought to limit: ‘Du sommet, il découvrit un vaste pays s’étendant de tous côtés jusqu’où l’œil pouvait atteindre, excepté vers le nord-ouest où l’horizon est borné dans le lointain par des montagnes bleuâtres. Vers le centre de ce tableau que traverse le Saint-Laurent, “grand, large, et spacieux,” s’élèvent quelques pics isolés.’ (101; From the summit, he discovered a vast expanse of land stretching out on all sides as far as the eye could reach, except to the northwest where the far horizon is closed by bluish mountains. Towards the centre of this painting, crossed by the Saint Lawrence, ‘large, wide, and spacious,’ arise several isolated peaks.) Given Garneau’s visual orientation (‘l’œil’), with an unprecedented suggestion of colour (‘montagnes bleuâtres’) and a distinct tendency toward vastness (‘vaste’), and his designation of the scene as a painting with centred composition (‘le centre de ce tableau’), it is significant that his single quote from Cartier emphasizes

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broad scope and aesthetic appeal, not the geometric and economic reference points that Cartier sought to anchor his vision and limit the space deployed before him. Even the Saguenay valley, denigrated by Champlain for its barrenness, is praised by Garneau for its natural beauty – ‘la grande et pittoresque contrée du Saguenay’ (192; the large and picturesque land of the Saguenay) – ascribed specifically to its grandeur (‘grandiose’), ruggedness (‘sauvage’), and irregularity (‘tourmentées’), which, to Garneau, more than compensate for its lack of fertility: ‘Rien n’est à la fois plus grandiose et plus sauvage que ces rives hardies et tourmentées; mais elles n’acquièrent ce caractère qu’aux dépens de leur vertu fertilisante.’ (193; Nothing is at once more grandiose and more wild than these hardy, tormented shores, but they acquire their character only at the expense of their fertility.) Clearly tastes have changed radically since the early descriptions of Cartier and Champlain; the uniform, even geometric, French vision of a focused place is supplanted by a broader vision of vast, irregular space, and Garneau’s writings point to several sources that may have come to modify the initial French visual heritage, including Chateaubriand’s writings (more than those of Charlevoix),21 but also the sublime British vision represented in McGregor’s description of Quebec, which is further evident in several early landscape paintings by British military personnel. British officers typically received training in topographical drawing, useful for military purposes, and some of the most accomplished ones, like Thomas Davies, naturally gravitated towards watercolour views of the breathtaking North American landscape; as Reid explains: ‘The topographical views of military officers were in fact simply one manifestation of the romantic inclination of English gentlemen of the later eighteenth century to delight in the splendours of the natural scenery or in anything they found in their travels that was charmingly primitive, rough, quaint, or exotic – in a word, picturesque’ (A Concise History, 19). In another word: Edenic; or in yet another, especially in vogue in late eighteenthcentury England: sublime,22 as in Davies’s 1791 watercolour, A View of the Montmorency Falls near Quebec (plate 2). Here the majestic stature of nature is captured by the height of the falls, the surge of its waters, the scope of the basin below, and the ruggedness of the terrain, all features disdained by Cartier and Champlain. ‘Composed in solid masses of luminous colour,’ with ‘linear patterns in which one layer of rock repeats another in an attractive pattern,’ the grandeur of the setting is enhanced by the precariously perched cabin on the top of the cliff,23 the minute

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figures of the anglers at the foot of the falls, a British officer and his lady on the rim of the basin, and the awestruck Amerindian in the foreground, who serves as an avatar of the watercolour’s spectator and suggests the aesthetic and emotional pleasure produced by this majestic scene. Indeed, another possible source of the expanded and expansive views of nature in Garneau’s time is the by now repeated contact with native Americans, whose pantheistic vision (215) tends to deify and personify natural phenomena (216), which, for Garneau, are all the more striking as they are grandiose: ‘Lorsqu’ils étaient en marche, la grandeur ou la beauté d’un fleuve, la hauteur ou la forme d’une montagne, la profondeur d’une crevasse dans le sol, le bruit d’une chute ou d’un rapide, frappaient-ils leur imagination, ils offraient des sacrifices aux esprits de ces fleuves et de ces montagnes.’ (219; When they were in transit, if the grandeur or the beauty of a river, the height or the shape of a mountain, the depth of a crevasse in the earth, the sound of a waterfall or a rapid, struck their imagination, they offered sacrifices to the spirits of those rivers or those mountains.) Here beauty is repeatedly linked to the proportion, not the utility, of natural phenomena and is a matter of imagination rather than reason. Certainly Garneau was himself struck and influenced by the Amerindian vision of nature, as evidenced by his description of their open-air burial ceremonies: ‘Seule la sombre majesté des forêts est en harmonie avec un spectacle aussi eloquent, et dont la grandeur semble être si au-dessus de nos mœurs artificielles et de convention.’ (226; Only the sombre majesty of the forests is in harmony with such an eloquent spectacle, whose grandeur seems so above our artificial customs based on convention.) Like Cartier and Champlain before him, Garneau was also impressed by the ability of native Americans to read visible signs, a key to survival in the wilderness: ‘Ils découvrent la trace d’un pas sur l’herbe la plus tendre comme sur la substance la plus dure, et ils lisent dans cette trace, la nation, le sexe, et la stature de la personne qui l’a faite, et le temps qui s’est écoulé depuis qu’elle a été formée.’ (207; They discover the trace of a footstep on the most tender grass as well as on the hardest substance, and from this track they can read the nation, the sex, and the stature of the person who made it, and the time that passed since it was formed.) Unlike the condescension of the earlier writers, however, Garneau displays great respect and even empathy for the Amerindian, based perhaps on the present parallel between the displaced native and the disenfranchised French Canadian. For example, Gilles Marcotte notes about Garneau’s poem, ‘Le dernier Huron’ (itself based on a painting

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by Antoine Plamondon, one of Légaré’s students): ‘il va sans dire que, derrière ce “dernier Huron,” se cache le “dernier Canadien,” que dans la disparition de la Huronie Garneau lit la disparition possible de sa propre nation’ (it goes without saying that behind this ‘last Huron’ hides the ‘last Canadian,’ that in the disappearance of the Huron people, Garneau reads the disappearance of his own nation).24 The key role of the Amerindian in early French-Canadian literature, painting, culture, and especially identity is the subject of the following chapter.

Chapter Two

Race, Place, and Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Short Story

Like Garneau’s Histoire du Canada (chapter one), published in 1845, French-Canadian fiction and painting emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century in response to an identity crisis stemming initially from the British Conquest in 1759 and culminating in a series of debilitating circumstances and traumatic events in the 1830s and 40s.1 For the French-Canadian people, haunted by feelings of humiliation, guilt, and doubt, this broad period was further marred by economic woes, depletion of the educated, ruralization and isolation of the populace, and erosion of civil rights, leading to the failed patriots’ rebellions of 1837–8 and to the brutal reprisals and threats of assimilation that ensued. Most historians of French-Canadian literature would agree with the introductory words of a recent study, which affirm that ‘après les Rébellions de 1837–1838, l’écrivain devient le porte-parole de la collectivité et participe à l’élaboration d’une nouvelle conscience nationale’ (after the rebellions of 1837–8, the writer becomes the spokesman for the collectivity and participates in the elaboration of a new national conscience).2 Moreover, as the social historians Havard and Vidal contend, the nationalism of this period often takes a particular turn towards the remote past of the French colonial period, with its founding figures and deeds (722–3). Certainly, numerous early nineteenth-century short stories and paintings turn back towards the seventeenth century for their subject matter, spanning, yet occulting the dreaded eighteenth century in search of the values of independence, ingenuity, and persistence they see and promote as central to the besieged national identity. Furthermore, their specific subjects are invariably set in a landscape that showcases the struggle against the wilderness and the weather on the one hand and

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against the Amerindian on the other; at the same time, this one-time adversary becomes a present-day avatar for the nineteenth-century artist looking backward for roots and values.3 The natural landscape is also invariably inscribed with signs of culture, not only those of religion and agriculture, but especially those staking out specific places, lieux de mémoire (Nora and Kritzman, xvii), which memorialize past feats and heroes and persist through the texts and paintings themselves, which then become the ultimate ‘sites of memory.’ L’Iroquoise Published anonymously in 1827 in two instalments of La Bibliothèque canadienne, the short story L’Iroquoise: Histoire, ou nouvelle historique is still widely considered to be among the first fictional works authored by a French Canadian born in the New World, even though a very similar English version appeared several months earlier in a New York newspaper.4 Like many short stories of the period, it begins with a narrative frame, explaining the story’s origin. Set in the recent past, a thirdperson narrator introduces a traveller (a frequent fictional stand-in for the reader), who is hosted by a ‘cultivateur’ with a manuscript, which remains illegible, even for the literate traveller. The manuscript serves, however, to ignite the memory of the peasant, who recounts to the traveller a story told to him by his grandfather. Around 1700, the grandfather’s French friend Bouchard had found the manuscript, written by one Père Mesnard, deceased for some time, which relates an event from the missionary’s past, presumably set around 1650.5 The content of Mesnard’s manuscript, as reported by Bouchard to his friend, who told it to his grandson, who (assisted by the third-person narrator) now recounts it to the traveller, is, then, the substance of the story. To simplify this complex narrative framework, we can represent it with approximate dates as follows: anonymous author’s story (1827) Æ peasant’s tale (ca 1800) Æ grandfather’s version (ca 1750) Æ Bouchard’s discovery (ca 1700) Æ Mesnard’s manuscript (ca 1650). Far from gratuitous, the chain of narrators, comprising a series of unbroken links from the nineteenth century to the French colonial past, guarantees the authenticity of the tale and certifies it as a genuine memorial and repository of national identity, through a discursive telescoping of past, present, and future essential to the process of commemoration, as described by Gérard Namer:

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Commémorer c’est donc remplir de sens les intervalles entre les temps mythiques évoqués; c’est s’appuyer sur des dates relais. Toute commémoration est une commémoration relais qui lie des dates secondaires au temps principal; toute commémoration est renvoi à des commémorations antérieures; toute commémoration tend à être, en somme, une mémoire de mémoires, ces mémoires en cascade qui renvoient jusqu’à un point limite du temps mythique [143–4]. Il est donc de l’essence de la commémoration de rendre contemporains, par une fiction théâtrale, le temps présent, le temps passé, le temps mythique d’une part, le temps présent et le temps futur d’autre part. Commémorer c’est donc jouer au présent, le théâtre du passé. [160; Commemorating thus involves filling the intervals between the evoked mythic times with meaning; it involves relying on relay dates. Any commemoration is a relay commemoration that links secondary dates to the principal time frame; any commemoration is a reference to earlier commemorations; in short any commemoration tends to be a memory of memories, cascading memories that refer to an end point in mythic time … It is thus the nature of commemoration to bring together, through theatrical fiction, present time, past time, and mythic time on the one hand; present time and future time on the other. Commemorating thus involves playing out in the present a scene from the past.]

Namer’s description of the French commemoration process following the Second World War provides a striking parallel to the set of cascading narrators who serve not only to relate but also to relay the legendary episode from the past through various points along the temporal continuum until it reaches the present, where its written configuration awaits future readers like us. Moreover, the story’s changing narrative status underscores both a waning faith in a single ‘authoritative’ narrator and the importance of the oral tradition among the largely illiterate early French Canadians, yet it also marks the necessity of the written work (both Mesnard’s manuscript and the anonymous author’s published story itself) for ultimately preserving cultural heritage. It is fitting that the first page of the story be devoted to storytelling, itself an essential ingredient in the memorializing process, as Namer contends (159–61). Once the narrative frame is set in place, it is equally fitting for that same memorialization process that Bouchard’s story begin with a lengthy landscape description, only part of which is given here, depicting the Frenchman’s arrival on the western shores of Lake Huron at

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what is now Saginaw Bay in Michigan (the French text is followed by the equivalent passage from its English predecessor): Ayant atteint le bord du lac, il marcha quelque temps le long de l’eau, jusqu’à ce que ayant passé une pointe de rochers, il arriva à un endroit qui lui parut avoir été fait par la nature pour un lieu de refuge. C’était un petit espace de terre en forme d’amphithéâtre, presque entièrement entouré par des rochers qui, saillant hardiment sur le lac à l’extrémité du demi-cercle, semblaient y étendre leurs formes gigantesques pour protéger ce temple de la nature … L’attention de Bouchard fut attirée par des groseilliers qui s’étaient fait jour à travers les crevasses des rochers, et qui, par leurs feuilles vertes et leurs fruits de couleur pourpre, semblaient couronner d’une guirlande le front chauve du précipice. Ce fruit est un de ceux que produisent naturellement les déserts de l’Amérique du Nord, et sans doute il parut aussi tentatif à Bouchard que l’auraient pu, dans les heureuses vallées de la France, les plus délicieux fruits des Hespérides. En cherchant l’accès le plus facile à ces groseilles, il découvrit dans les rochers une petite cavité qui ressemblait tellement à un hamac, qu’il semblait que l’art s’était joint à la nature pour la former. Elle avait probablement procuré un lieu de repos au chasseur ou au pêcheur sauvage, car elle était jonchée de feuilles sèches, de manière à procurer une couche délicieuse à un homme accoutumé depuis plusieurs mois à dormir sur une couverture de laine étendue sur la terre nue. Après avoir cueilli les fruits, Bouchard se retira dans la grotte et oublia pour un temps qu’il était séparé de son pays par de vastes forêts et une immense solitude. Il écouta les sons harmonieux des vagues légères qui venaient se briser sur les roseaux et les pierres du rivage, et contempla la voûte azurée des cieux et les nuages dorés de l'été. [L’Iroquoise, 27–8; Having attained the margin of the lake, he loitered along the water’s edge, till turning an angle of the rock, he came to a spot, which seemed to have been contrived by nature for a place of refuge. It was a little interval of ground, in the form of an amphitheatre, nearly enfolded by the rocks, which as they projected boldly into the lake, at the extremity of the semicircle, looked as if their giant forms had been set there to defend this temple of nature … Bouchard was attracted to some gooseberries that had forced themselves through the crevices in the rocks, and which seemed to form, with their purple berries and bright green leaves, a garland around the bald brow of the precipice. They are among the few indigenous fruits of the wilderness, and doubtless looked as tempting to Bouchard, as the most delicious fruits of the Hesperides would in his own sunny valley of France. In reconnoitering

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for the best mode of access to the fruit, he discovered a small cavity in the rock, that so much resembled a berth in a ship as to appear to have been the joint work of nature and art. It had probably supplied the savage hunter or fisherman with a place of repose, for it was strewed with decayed leaves, so matted together as to form a luxurious couch for one accustomed for many months to sleeping on a blanket, spread on the bare ground. After possessing himself of the berries, Bouchard crept into the recess, and he forgot for a while the tangled forests, and the wide unbroken wilderness that interposed between him and his country. He listened to the soft musical sounds of the light waves, as they broke on the shelving rock and reedy bank: and he gazed on the bright element which reflected the blue vault of heaven, and the fleecy summer cloud. (The Iroquoise, 40–2)]

The description is clearly structured around the contrast between vast space and enclosed place. Indeed, the very vastness of the space (‘de vastes forêts’), its isolation (‘une immense solitude’), and discomfort (‘la terre nue’), coupled with nostalgia for his homeland (‘séparé de son pays’) cause Bouchard to seek a safe place (‘un lieu de refuge,’ ‘petit espace,’ ‘petite cavité,’ ‘un lieu de repos’). The author’s subsequent description of this sheltered place further humanizes it, through architectural comparisons (‘en forme d’amphithéâtre,’ ‘demi-cercle,’ ‘ce temple de la nature,’ ‘la voûte azurée des cieux’), personifications (‘semblaient couronner d’une guirlande le front chauve du précipice’), and comparisons with the French landscape (‘les heureuses vallées de la France’), which lead to an overall impression of the coupling of culture and nature (‘l’art s’était joint à la nature’). Bouchard’s story continues with yet another natural place, a natural excavation, described in architectural terms as a pyramid (29), namely the resting place of Mesnard and the hiding place of his manuscript, both of which can be characterized as lieux de mémoire, repositories of significant cultural artefacts: first the place, as described by Bouchard’s Indian guide (‘Ce doit être l’endroit dont j’ai souvent entendu parler nos anciens. Un homme de bien y est mort’ [29; This must be the place of which I have so often heard our ancients speak: a good man died here (44)]), then the manuscript, carefully preserved by Bouchard (‘Il conserva le manuscrit comme une relique sainte; et celui qui tomba dans les mains de notre voyageur, chez le cultivateur canadien, était une copie qu’il en avait tirée pour l’envoyer en France. L’original avait été écrit par le P. Mesnard, dont la mémoire vénérée avait consacré la

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cellule du lac Huron’ [30; The manuscript he kept as a holy relic; and that which fell into the hands of our traveler at the cottage of the Canadian peasant, was a copy he had made to transmit to France. The original was written by Pere Mesnard whose blessed memory had consecrated the cell on Lake Huron (46)]). The contents of Mesnard’s manuscript are then recounted by the third-person narrator, presumably based on the peasant’s memory of his grandfather’s tale. Like Bouchard’s story, Mesnard’s tale is also dominated by the coupling and uncoupling of nature and culture. Pursuing his mission to propagate his religion, Mesnard adopts two Iroquois maidens, captured by the Ottawas, the tribe he seeks to ‘civilize.’ The maiden baptized ‘Rosalie’ takes immediately and completely to Christianity, whereas ‘Françoise,’ while showing definite signs of devotion, also remains faithful to her natural origins, a phenomenon Mesnard captures through a simile drawn from nature: ‘Françoise ressemblait à une plante qui étend ses fleurs de tous côtés’ (31; Françoise resembled a luxuriant plant, that shows out its flowers on every side [50]). Her actions also link her to nature – ‘elle aimait à se promener dans les bois, à s’asseoir au bord d’une cascade’ (31; she loved to rove in the woods – to sit gazing on the rapids [50]) – gestures borrowed no doubt from characters like Chateaubriand’s René, who was based on the image of the Amerindian injected into French Romantic iconography. During a clandestine visit to lure Françoise back to her Iroquois origins, her mother, Genanhatenna, underscores the contrast between the confines of culture and the freedom of nature – ‘on te renfermera dans les murs de pierre où tu ne respiriras plus l’air frais, où tu n’entendras plus le chant des oiseaux, ni le murmure des eaux’ (33; they will shut you up, within stone walls where you will never again breathe the fresh air – never hear the songs of birds, nor the dashing of waters [52, 54]). Françoise is on the point of returning, but stops when she learns she can’t also practice Christianity, and eventually, true to the suggestion of her given name, marries a French officer, Eugène Brunon, who had saved her from the Indian party accompanying her mother (and who is none other than Mesnard’s nephew). Françoise, who is Iroquois but also Christian and French, thus maintains her hybrid status as native yet cultured. In fact, all of the characters form contrasting pairs, which, albeit loosely, can be said to represent culture and nature: The French versus the Indians; the Ottawas versus the Iroquois; Rosalie versus Françoise; Françoise’s Christian (and French) ties versus her Iroquois origins.

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This same mixture is reflected in the landscape, namely in Père Mesnard’s colony, which shows nature succumbing to the order of agriculture: Le Père Mesnard, suivant sa coutume journalière, avait à visiter les cabanes de son petit troupeau: il s’arrêta devant la croix qu’il avait fait ériger au centre du village; il jeta ses regards sur les champs préparés pour la moisson de l’été, sur les arbres fruitiers enrichis de bourgeons naissants; il vit les femmes et les enfants travaillant avec ardeur dans leurs petits jardins, et il éleva son coeur vers Dieu, pour le remercier de s’être servi de lui pour retirer ces pauvres sauvages d’une vie de misère. [36; Pere Mesnard had been according to his daily custom to visit the huts of his little flock. He stopped before the crucifix which he had caused to be erected in the centre of the village; he looked out upon the fields, prepared for the summer crops; upon the fruit trees, gay with herald blossoms; he saw the women and the children busily at work in their little garden-patches, and he raised his heart in devout thankfulness to God who had permitted him to be the instrument of redeeming those poor savages from a suffering life. (60)]

The visuality of the description is underscored by the insistence on Mesnard’s view point (‘il jeta ses regards,’ ‘il vit’), and the natural landscape transformed into a garden matches the natural Amerindians transformed into Christians, as punctuated by the symbolic cross in the centre of the village, an ideal scene befitting the French colonial vision of the New World. In the following sentence, however, as Mesnard contemplates the cross, the ultimate Christian symbol, he sees another sign, a natural one, foreboding death and destruction: ‘Il jeta ses yeux sur le symbole sacré, devant lequel il s’agenouilla, et vit une ombre passer dessus. Il crut d’abord que c’était celle d’un nuage qui passait; mais quand, ayant parcouru des yeux la voûte du ciel, il la vit sans nuages, il ne douta point que ce ne fût le présage de quelque malheur’ (36; He cast his eye on the holy symbol, before which he knelt, and saw a shadow flit over it. He thought it was a passing cloud, but when he looked upward, he perceived the sky was cloudless, and then he knew full well it was a presage of coming evil [60]). Mesnard’s reading of the omen proves all too true as the Iroquois tribe, whose chief is Françoise’s father, attacks the village, routing the Ottawas, wounding Mesnard, killing Eugène, and carrying off Françoise, who is then burned for refusing to renounce Christianity

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(as later reported to Mesnard by a then captured but later released Ottawa maiden who witnessed the martyrdom). In one sense the entire story revolves around the reading or misreading of signs. Mesnard’s manuscript is illegible, not only to the illiterate farmer, but also to the educated traveller because ‘l’écriture est presque effacée’ (25; the ink has faded [36]). But if these written signs remain indecipherable, material ones prove easier to read, especially for Bouchard’s native guide, who easily interprets the age, sex, and marital status of recent visitors to Mesnard’s resting place, based on their offerings (29). And, just as Mesnard is able to read the future from a black shadow, Françoise’s mother can read impending vengeance through natural signs: ‘Le jour de la vengeance de ton père viendra; j’en ai entendu la promesse dans le souffle des vents et le murmure des eaux.’ (34; The day of your father’s vengeance will come – I have heard the promise in the murmuring stream, and in the rushing wind [56].) Indeed, the entire final scene of the story can be characterized as a battle of signs between Françoise and her father, who, like two stubborn semioticians of different generations and schools, debate the meaning and value of certain symbols, especially the cross. The word ‘signe’ itself occurs no fewer than six times on the final page, as her father rips the cross from Françoise’s hands and cuts a cross-shaped incision into her breast, exclaiming: ‘Voilà, dit-il, le signe que tu aimes; le signe de la ligne avec les ennemis de ton père, le signe qui t’a rendue sourde à la voix de tes parents’ (43; ‘Behold!’ he said, ‘the sign thou lovest – the sign of thy league with thy father’s enemies – the sign that made thee deaf to the voice of thy kind’ [74]). Françoise promptly retorts by triumphantly thanking him – ‘Je te remercie, mon père, répliqua Françoise en souriant d’un air de triomphe; j’ai perdu la croix que tu m’a ôtée; mais celle que tu m’as donnée, je la porterai même après ma mort’ (43; ‘Thank thee, my father!’ replied Françoise, with a triumphant smile; ‘I have lost the cross thou hast taken from me, but this which thou hast given me, I shall bear even after death!’ [76]) – after which she is consumed by flames, ‘et la martyre iroquoise y périt’ (43; and the IROQUOISE MARTYR perished [76]). The story ends here, with no return to the narrative framework. Guided into the remote past, the reader is stranded there, left to ponder the story’s import, namely, who has won the battle: Culture or Nature? To be sure, a Christian symbol ends the tale, but it is most effective when transformed from a cultural sign into a natural one, engraved on Françoise’s flesh. To be sure, Françoise dies to preserve her faith, but

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she also endures her torture to avenge her dead husband and to demonstrate her Iroquois origins, as her father proudly proclaims: ‘Ah! s’écria le père avec transport, le pur sang des Iroquois coule dans ses veines.’ (42; ‘Ha!’ exclaimed the old man, exultingly, ‘the pure blood of the Iroquois runs in her veins’ [72].) And, after all, the story’s title is L’Iroquoise, not La Chrétienne! Similarly, all traces of culture are erased from Mesnard’s colony (‘toutes les traces de la culture effacées à SaintLouis’ (40), just as the traces of his text are erased from the manuscript. Yet, Mesnard pushes west into Huron territory, where his maxims remain engraved in the hearts of his followers – ‘les Hurons ont encore plusieurs de ses maximes gravées dans leur coeur’ (29) – and the content of his illegible manuscript is preserved forever by the anonymous author’s published story. In short, we have a tale that is deliciously ambivalent and thus decidedly modern, but also definitely ‘national’ in reviving ancestral heroes, deeds, and values.6 Perhaps the specific message is less important than the memorializing process, the creation of cultural sites of memory: the cell alongside Lake Huron for Mesnard, the text itself for the Iroquois martyr. The missionary and the Amerindian, two key cultural icons from the French colonial period are resurrected in the early nineteenth century as components of the French-Canadian identity, one representing culture, the other nature, and together the perpetual interplay between the two, which also characterizes the early painting of the period, especially that of Joseph Légaré, in which we find a commensurate conflation of epochs, races, and messages in the service of commemoration. Joseph Légaré Joseph Légaré (1795–1855), a French-Canadian partisan, patriot, and politician, founded the first public art gallery in Quebec (indeed in Canada) in 1833 and was, according to John Porter, ‘the first native Canadian landscape-painter’ (Joseph Légaré, 16, his italics). In addition to numerous landscapes, Légaré did many paintings of Amerindians, including his Martyre de Françoise Brunon-Gonannhatenha, 1827–40 (figure 2.1), in which he illustrated not only a long-standing legend of an Amerindian martyr but, seemingly, the story L’Iroquoise itself.7 Here, quite uncharacteristically, Légaré reduces the landscape to a minimum in order to focus on the dramatic final scene of the legend, depicted faithfully in L’Iroquoise, where Françoise is confronted by her father, who holds the crucifix he had torn from her before carving

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2.1 Joseph Légaré, Martyre de Françoise Brunon-Gonannhatenha, 1827–40. Huile sur papier fort, 38,8 x 30,5 cm. Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Dr.1979.16, achat, legs Horsley et Annie Townsend. Photo: MBAM / Martyrdom of Françoise Brunon-Gonannhatenha, 1827–40. Oil on thick paper, 38.8 x 30.5 cm. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Dr.1979.16, Horsley and Annie Townsend Bequest. Photo: MMFA.

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another on her breast.8 Didier Prioul identifies several aspects of the painting that are typical of Légaré’s early work – ‘Les figures alignées au premier plan, l’absence de profondeur du paysage et les rehauts lumineux distribués sur le liséré des pièces de vêtements indiquent la première manière de l’artiste’ (‘Joseph Légaré, paysagiste,’ 193; The figures aligned in the foreground, the lack of depth in the landscape, and the light accenting distributed on the borders of the clothing suggest the artist’s first manner) – to the degree that he proposes its date as 1827 or 1828, that is, right after the publication of the story. Although she will die by burning, the crucifixion motif, and thus westernization of the scene, is further emphasized by the vertical blocking of the canvas, the cross-like arrangement of the logs in the foreground, and the Christlike pose of the victim, herself set directly against a massive central tree, as was Christ against the cross. Terming this painting ‘une mosaïque d’emprunts’ (mosaic of borrowed elements), Prioul posits several potential sources including Rubens, Rosa, and DaVinci, thus further illustrating the amalgamation of the Amerindian and European traditions, as does the painting’s title, which emphasizes the native’s ties to FrenchCanadian heritage, not only through religion (martyre) but also through her married name (Brunon). A far more intricate treatment of space and place, nature and culture, Amerindian and European, is found in Légaré’s famous Paysage au monument à Wolfe, circa 1845 (plate 3). Here the vast space of the mountains in the far ground and the wild space of the forest in the foreground are set against the enclosed place of the middle ground, encompassing the statue of the British general Wolfe to the mid-right and the anonymous Amerindian chief to its left. Indeed the various planes of the painting are brought together by matching the twin peaks in the distance to the two figures in the middle ground, and by mimicking Wolfe’s gesture with the broken trees in the foreground, a suggestion perhaps of nature’s force and persistence, which also serves to frame the scene itself. But the painting’s meaning remains as cryptic as it is suggestive. The statue clearly marks the spot as a place of commemoration, but the image of Wolfe comes from a then-recent engraving, not from any existing statue; its base is cracked and its inscription missing. The Amerindian seems to render his bow in a gesture of submission, but he retains an axe, a tomahawk, and a gun beside him, while his canoe awaits him to the right. The fact that the Indians fought against the British alongside the French on the Plains of Abraham (Benjamin West’s famous painting of Wolfe’s death notwithstanding)

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seems to link the latter two cultures, as does the barely visible presence of a beaver (castor), symbol of the French-Amerindian fur trade and alliance, on a mound to the Native’s left. Since Légaré was arrested for sedition in 1837, he is likely exploring his relationship to British rule, but is it one of submission as some claim9 or of resistance as proposed by others? François-Marc Gagnon, a proponent of the latter option, contends that ‘l’Indien est donc réduit ici à une pure fonction symbolique. Il tient la place d’un sentiment: le goût de la liberté qui reste vivant au coeur des Fils de la liberté et de tous les vrais “patriotes.”’ (‘Joseph Légaré,’ 45; the Indian is thus reduced here to a pure symbolic function. He stands for a feeling: the taste for freedom that remains alive in the hearts of the Sons of Freedom and of all true ‘patriots.’)10 The controversy itself seems to confirm Prioul’s assessment of the ‘ambivalence’ of the painting (‘Paysage,’ 365), but perhaps this very ambivalence captures that of Légaré and all French-Canadian patriots, obliged to acknowledge British supremacy, but determined to assert French and Amerindian sovereignty, if only for the future; as Gagnon and Lacasse put it: ‘Au moment où le présent semblait si sombre pour la nation canadienne-française, il n’y avait plus qu’à rêver d’un très lointain avenir où le vainqueur d’aujourd’hui ne sera plus qu’un souvenir oublié, une vieille statue dérisoire.’ (74; At a time when the present seemed so sombre for the French-Canadian nation, the only recourse was to dream of a faraway future when today’s victor will be no more than a forgotten memory, a ridiculous old statue.) It is the painting itself that becomes the means of fostering and perpetuating this nationalist dream through the same process of collapsing past (‘souvenir’), present (‘le présent’), and future (‘un très lointain avenir’), described by Gagnon and Lacasse, that characterizes the mechanism of memorialization, as described by Namer and witnessed in relation to L’Iroquoise. Louise and Caroline Despite their French names, the maidens of this subtitle are two Amerindians, victimized by Europeans yet memorialized by them in short stories by Pierre-Georges Boucher de Boucherville and Amédée Papineau, respectively. Both writers were, like the painter Légaré, implicated in the failed patriots’ rebellions. Boucher de Boucherville’s ‘Louise Chawinikisique’ (1835) begins with a lengthy disquisition on the fragility of monuments, which, like the people or events they are meant to commemorate, are doomed to

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disappear ‘sous la dent corrosive des siècles’ (47; at the corrosive bite of the centuries). The first-person narrator, who identifies himself as the author of the tale we are about to read, is honoured (‘je me glorifie’ [48]) to be a native Canadian and determined to preserve its ‘faits mémorables,’ which, he notes are often linked to the landscape: ‘Peut-être la terre que je foule maintenant sous mes pieds a-t-elle été le théâtre de quelque grand exploit?’ (48; Perhaps the land that I’m now treading upon has been the scene of some great deed?) In his old age, as he rereads his own previous writings, he now understands the true cultural meaning of certain episodes from his youth, including the subject of the present short story, ‘parmi les cent et un épisodes qui composent la chronique des peuples du Canada’ (among the hundred and one episodes that compose the chronicle of the peoples of Canada), which he has decided to publish in order to give ‘une idée des mœurs de ses premiers habitants, que l’on avait peints si farouches et d’un caractère si barbare’ (49; an idea of the mores of its first inhabitants, who have been depicted as so fierce and so barbarous in character). In short, FrenchCanadian history and even the identity of the ‘habitant’ are intricately bound to its ‘premiers habitants,’ the Amerindians, and can be preserved only by the tale itself, a monument that withstands the corrosive effects of time. Part one of the story is entitled ‘La pierre de Louise’ (Louise’s rock) and prefaced by a quote taken directly from Chateaubriand’s Atala (87): ‘Si tu crains les troubles du cœur, défie-toi des retraites sauvages: Les grandes passions sont solitaires, et les transporter au désert, ce n’est que les rendre à leur empire.’ (50; If you fear the troubles of the heart, beware of wild places: Great passions are solitary, and transporting them into the wilderness only returns them to their empire.) While the thought appears to condemn pure nature (‘retraites sauvages’) and solitude, the story itself begins, nonetheless, with an episode from his youth in which the solitary narrator is transfixed by an enchanting natural landscape: ‘Un instant encore et l’horizon présentait le spectacle le plus enchanteur. D’un côté des groupes de montagnes dont les formes bizarres se dessinaient sur le fond doré d’un ciel étincelant de lumière, que lançait au-devant de lui l’astre du jour.’ (50; One more instant and the horizon presented the most enchanting spectacle. On one side, groups of mountains whose bizarre shapes were sketched out against the golden background of a sky sparkling with light, which the sun cast before itself.) Although succinctly sketched, the landscape is presented in a painterly manner as a ‘spectacle’ with shapes (‘formes bizarres’)

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drawn (‘se dessinaient’) against a background (‘fond’) rendered by qualities of colour (‘doré’) and light (‘étincelant de lumière’). The vastness of the setting (‘l’horizon’) is soon narrowed, and the narrator’s solitude is ended by the appearance of an old man standing before a stone, both of which, like the breaking dawn, launch the telling of the tale. For the old man, the stone, located at a precise spot at Coteaude-Sable on the northwest part of the île de Montréal, is a memorial, ‘un monument sacré’ (51), just as the tale itself will become so for the reader. By adeptly reading visual signs, the young narrator is able to identify the old man as an Iroquois – ‘Son large front sillonné de deux énormes cicatrices annonçaient assez un de ces fiers enfants des forêts … C’était le vrai type Iroquois.’ (52; His wide forehead furrowed with two enormous scars announced one of those proud children of the forest … He was the archetypical Iroquois.) The old man then narrates his own story, transporting the reader yet another level into the past, through an authentic witness account, in typical memorializing fashion. Louise is an Algonquin maiden who lives with her father, the tribe’s chief, on the banks of Lake Nipissing. So wild and beautiful is Louise that the Iroquois narrator is led to describe her by a metaphor borrowed from European culture and visual art: ‘Vous l’eussiez prise pour Diane Chasseresse, si vous l’eussiez vue seule.’ (53; You would have taken her for Diana the Huntress if you had seen her alone.) Caught on the lake in a storm, she is rescued by the Algonquin brave Saguima, who then saves her a second time when her father is killed and their tribe is disbursed in a raid by a Mohawk (Agniers) tribe of the Iroquois nation led by Canatagayon, who tries to carry her off, only to be thwarted by Saguima, whose wild passions are then relayed by a comparison to a natural phenomenon, molten lava (59). As the distraught Louise, Saguima, and an old Algonquin (‘le vieux de la forêt’) make their escape down the Ottawa River, they reach an isolated island where they stop, as does the first part of the story. The story’s second part, untitled, continues to display Boucher de Boucherville’s highly visual style, as in the following landscape description: ‘La lune, assise sur un groupe de nuages qui se découpent sous toutes formes dans l’azur du firmament, verse paisiblement sa pâle lumière sur les plaines, qui s’étendent jeunes et fleuries.’ (61–2; The moon, seated on a group of clouds cut out in many shapes against the azure of the firmament, peacefully pours its pale light on the plains, which stretch out young and flowering.) The description is painterly in its insistence on planes defined by light, yet nature is highly personified, as exemplified

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by ‘assise,’ ‘paisiblement,’ and ‘jeunes.’ Both techniques, the visual and the figurative, serve to link the characters to their natural setting, as does the insistence on viewpoint in the scene where Saguima witnesses the departure of his old tribesman: ‘Saguima longtemps suit des yeux le vieux de la forêt qui l’abandonne. Il voit le canot qui s’éloigne, et avec lui ses espérances. Il regarde encore; quelque chose apparaît au loin, comme un point noir, sur une vague; puis tout se confond avec l’horizon; puis plus rien … Il est seul.’ (64; For a long time Saguima’s eyes follow the old man of the forest who is abandoning him. He sees the canoe going away, and with it his hopes. He looks again; something appears in the distance, like a black dot, on a wave; then everything fades into the horizon; then nothing at all … He is alone.) The visuality of the scene is underscored not only by the various expressions that denote seeing (‘suit des yeux,’ ‘Il voit,’ ‘Il regarde’), but especially by the visual effects that betray the viewpoint and even the expressions of the character (‘quelque chose,’ ‘comme un point noir,’ ‘plus rien’). Although mediated by the narrator, the passage signals the expert use of the technique of free indirect discourse, highlighted by the present tense of the character’s perspective rather than the past tense of the narrator’s. If Saguima is described by the narrator as ‘alone,’ it is because Louise has contracted smallpox, a curse brought on the Amerindians by Europeans (63). Again Saguima saves Louise’s life, but at the expense of his own; as he languishes near death, however, hope is raised in a scene reversing the departure witnessed by Saguima, in which Louise perceives the arrival of a canoe: Elle mesure d’un regard effrayant l’étendue de la rivière, et cherche à en sonder la profondeur. Avancée sur le tronc d’un arbre renversé dans l’eau, elle allait peut-être s’y précipiter, quand elle aperçut au loin un canot qui venait de son côté. Bientôt elle put distinguer une robe noire et reconnaître le vieux de la forêt. Quelques minutes de plus et le canot touche au rivage. Oh! Comme le cœur de Louise tressaillit d’allégresse quand elle reconnut le père Piquet, celui qui avait guidé ses premiers pas dans la voie du salut. C’est lui qui vient encore sauver son enfant et donner la vie éternelle à celui qui fut son libérateur. [68–9; With a frightened gaze she measures the expanse of the river and tries to sound its depth. Advancing on a tree trunk fallen into the water, she was perhaps going to jump in when she perceived in the distance a canoe coming towards her. Soon she could distinguish a black cassock and recognize the old man of the forest. Several minutes more and the canoe reaches the bank. Oh! How Louise’s heart quivered with elation when she recognized Père Piquet, he who had guided

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Literature and Painting in Quebec her first steps on the path of salvation. It is he who has returned to save his child and give eternal life to her liberator.]

Again the personal viewpoint is marked not only by expressions of visual perception (‘un regard,’ ‘elle aperçut,’ ‘elle reconnut’), but by the very stages of the act of perceiving, from the impression of a detail for one of the two persons in the canoe (‘elle put distinguer une robe noire’) to his later identification (‘elle reconnut le père Piquet’). We learn here that Louise, like Atala, is a Christian, and this religious difference creates the same dilemma for her and her lover as it did for Chateaubriand’s cursed couple: ‘Mais sa religion lui défend d’aimer un idolâtre; et Saguima n’est point Chrétien.’ (66; But her religion prohibits her from loving an idolater; and Saguima is not a Christian.) Fortunately, Père Piquet is able to do what Père Aubry cannot: baptize the infidel and join the couple in marriage, albeit, in this case, just as the man, not the maiden, expires (71). Accompanied by the grieving widow, Père Piquet transports Saguima’s body to his mission at Coteau-de-Sable, where it is buried under the stone that launched the tale. Twenty years after this event, but at least twenty years before he recounts the story, the Iroquois had discovered the stone and learned its lore from a Huron, who, presumably, also filled him in on the details he could not have known personally of Louise and Saguima’s life. The story then returns to the initial narrative frame, as the youthful Canadian narrator queries the old Indian storyteller about the fate of the other characters, including Canatagayon, the Mohawk chief and would-be ravisher, whom the Iroquois proudly identifies as himself – ‘Canatagayon! C’est moi!’ – as the story ends. Clearly the tale is one of harmony and unity, not only between the lovers, Louise and Saguima, and between them and the European Père Piquet, but especially between the Algonquins and Canatagayon, who is proud to have ‘buried the hatchet’ (so to speak), and even more between the young Canadian narrator and his new Amerindian ‘ami’ (52), the old (and formerly dreaded) Iroquois warrior. The narration not only makes a memorial, but forges a friendship, both of which mirror a vision of a new national hybrid identity that Boucher de Boucherville appears to promote. The much shorter story, ‘Caroline’ (1837), by Amédée Papineau bears many similarities to ‘Louise Chawinikisique,’ beginning with the retrospective narrative framework. The narrator recalls an excursion with his father and a friend of his father to the Montmorency Falls near Quebec City in 1831, when the narrator was just leaving the seminary,

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poised on the threshold of life. This indication of the narrative frame is followed immediately by a description of the falls: L’onde bouillonnante se précipite entre deux rochers escarpés, avec un bruit sourd qui ne laisse pas que de plaire. Les environs sont magnifiques et sont bien relevés par la beauté de cette chute. Il nous semblait voir une belle colonne d’albâtre incrustée de pierreries, dont toutes les parties auraient eu un mouvement oscillant, tant la masse d’eau écumait, tant elle est étroite et perpendiculaire. Le soleil y dardait ses rayons, et achevait de rendre le spectacle imposant. [80; The bubbling wave hastens between two steep rocks, with a muffled sound that does not fail to please. The surroundings are magnificent and highlighted by the beauty of the falls. We seemed to be seeing a beautiful alabaster column encrusted with precious stones, whose every part had an oscillating movement, so frothing was the mass of water, so narrow and perpendicular is its flow. The sun shot its rays and finalized the imposing spectacle.]

We are clearly far from Champlain’s sparse verbal designation of this very spot as simply ‘de 25 toises’ and much closer to Davies’s watercolour of these very Montmorency Falls (figure 1.4). While being impressed, indeed pleased (‘plaire’) by the turbulence (‘bouillonnante’) and ruggedness (‘escarpé’) of the spectacle, Papineau’s narrator is also struck by its architectural form (‘une belle colonne d’albâtre incrustée de pierreries’). Although movement is seen in the parts (‘un mouvement oscillant’), the main mass remains geometrically sound (‘étroite et perpendiculaire’), in short, a perfect combination of nature and culture, to which the addition of the visual effect of active light (‘le soleil dardait ses rayons’) completes the magnificent scene (‘spectacle imposant’). After considerable time spent admiring ‘ces beautés de la nature’ (80; these natural beauties), the party then actively seeks signs of national culture, ‘à la recherche d’un morceau d’antiquité canadienne’ (80; looking for a morsel of Canadian antiquity), all the more precious as they are rare in this new and still wild land. Following a three-hour walk, they reach a high plateau, from which they contemplate another vast scene: A notre droite et derrière nous, était un bois touffu; à notre gauche, on voyait au loin des campagnes verdoyantes, de riches moissons, de blanches chaumières, et à l’horizon, sur un promontoire élevé, la ville et la citadelle de Québec; devant nous s’élevait un amas de ruines, des murs crénelés et couverts de mousse et de lierre, une tour à demi tombée,

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Literature and Painting in Quebec quelques poutres, un débris de toit. C’était là le but de notre voyage. [80; To our right and behind us were dense woods; to our left one could see the verdant fields, rich crops, white cottages, and on the horizon, on an elevated promontory, the city and citadel of Quebec; before us rose a mass of ruins, crenellated walls covered in moss and ivy, a half-fallen tower, a few beams, the remnants of a roof. That was our destination.]

Surrounded by nature (‘un bois touffu’), the three viewers contemplate various signs of culture, in a space carefully delineated by directions and planes in a highly pictorial manner befitting a landscape painting: to the left a few cottages defined by their colour (‘de blanches chaumières’); in the distance, the city of Quebec, denoted by its position (‘sur un promontoire élevé); in the near ground, set against this vast expanse of space, is the sought after place, the ruins of a past icon that constitute a memorial. Accordingly, the place gives rise to memory when the party explores the ruins and discovers, partially buried underground, ‘une pierre sépulcrale que nous heurtâmes du pied’ (81; a gravestone that we stumbled upon), inscribed with the letter C, which then sparks the tale, recounted by the father’s friend. The intendant Bigot, whose misdeeds during the Seven Years War (French and Indian War) were widely known in France and in the New World, had built his country home at this spot, where his passion for the hunt had led him to get lost in the wilderness, ‘une vaste forêt’ (82). In a scene of slow-motion perception that extends for nearly a full page (83), in a story of only seven pages, Bigot sees first ‘quelque chose de blanc’ (something white), which he initially takes for ‘un fantôme de la nuit, un manitou du désert, un de ces génies …’ (a phantom of the night, a force of nature, one of those spirits). After standing, and looking further at the approaching form, ‘Il voit un être humain’ (he sees a human being), which he compares successively to several figures from European literature, like ‘ces nymphes, légères habitantes des forêts. C’est la sylphide de Chateaubriand! C’est Malz! C’est Velléda!’ (those nymphs, light forest dwellers. It’s Chateaubriand’s sylph! It’s Malz! It’s Velleda!)11 Then, from a series of partial impressions, ‘une figure charmante, de grands yeux bruns, une blancheur éclatante, de longs cheveux noirs’ (a charming face, large brown eyes, shining whiteness, long black hair), he constructs a complete image of ‘cette fille de la forêt’ (this daughter of the forest) whom he (like Saguima) compares to Diane (‘on croirait voir Diane’), before she finally identifies herself as Caroline, the ‘creole’ daughter of a French

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officer of high standing and an Indian mother from the Beaver tribe of the Algonquin Nation. As a daughter of the forest, Caroline is able to lead Bigot back to his country home, where the renowned womanizer convinces her to stay on as his mistress, much to the dismay of his absent wife, who, upon learning of the situation, decides to visit the intendant on the night of July 2. Suffice it to say that, during the night, Caroline is assassinated by a mysterious woman, perhaps the jealous wife, perhaps Caroline’s irate mother, and we learn, as the friend’s tale ends, that it is the intendant himself who has the gravestone erected as a memorial to the Amerindian maiden. We return to the young narrator, who, during the homeward-bound leg of the trip, promises himself to never forget the memory. Six years later, he writes: ‘Puisque l’occasion s’en est présenté, j’ai préféré en coucher le récit sur le papier, toujours plus sûr et plus fidèle que la meilleure mémoire’ (85; Since the occasion arose, I preferred setting the tale down on paper, always safer and more faithful than the best memory). Indeed the ‘memory’ (la mémoire) becomes a memoir (le mémoire) and thus a memorial (lieu de mémoire) commemorating a significant part of Canada’s national identity, not only because of the characters but especially because of their races, here again joined together through their link to a particular place, at once geographical and textual. Most puzzling, perhaps, for Papineau – an avid patriot, son of Parti patriote leader Louis-Joseph Papineau, and co-founder of the Fils de la Liberté (Sons of Liberty) – whose implication in the rebellions was so strong that he had to leave Canada for the United States until 1843, is the relatively anodyne treatment of Bigot, whose fraudulent misuse of funds was a huge factor in the loss of New France to the British, the very subject of several nationalist novels later in the century. Far from vilifying Bigot, the narrator lends him the very traits most prized by French Canadians and possessed by the Amerindians: ‘Il y avait peu de chasseurs plus habiles et plus intrépides: léger comme un sauvage, il parcourait les forêts, escaladait les rochers … aussi expert à tirer qu’à courir.’ (82; There were few hunters more skilful and more intrepid: light like a native, he roamed the forest, scaled rocks … as expert a shot as he was an explorer.) Bigot is also depicted as ‘éperdu’ (distraught) by Caroline’s death, and it is he who memorializes her by erecting her tomb, albeit now crumbling and nearly forgotten. Maurice Lemire, in a chapter on works devoted to Bigot’s ignominy, queries Papineau’s intentions: ‘Quand en 1836, Amédée Papineau écrivit Caroline, il ne fit que transcrire une légende orale qui circulait dans le peuple depuis combien

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d’années? Nous n’en savons rien.’ (Les grands thèmes, 121; When Amédée Papineau wrote Caroline in 1836, he was merely transcribing an oral legend that had been circulating among the people for how many years? We have no idea.) But, as the rabid nationalist and French Canada’s first literary critic, Abbé Henri-Raymond Casgrain, suggested in the late nineteenth century, maybe such transcription was itself a step towards patriotism: ‘Ne serait-ce pas une œuvre patriotique que de réunir toutes ces diverses anecdotes, et de conserver ainsi cette noble part de notre héritage historique?’ (2; Wouldn’t it be a patriotic deed to collect all those diverse anecdotes and thus conserve this noble part of our historical heritage?) Papineau seems less intent on recalling or rewriting past history than on shoring up the then fragile French-Canadian identity and constructing a new monument, the tale itself, in order to promote a union between the French and Amerindian that, in being true to the past, represents his vision of the future. For Papineau, and for the French Canadian of the mid-nineteenth century in search of sources of national identity, freedom-loving ‘others’ from the past (like the Amerindian and the voyageur) become significant ‘subjects,’ as we also see in the tale of Jean Cadieux. Jean Cadieux According to legend, Jean Cadieux, born in Boucherville (near Montreal) in 1671, founded a family with an Algonquin woman and lived in a native settlement while serving as a guide for traders before meeting his end in 1709 in a manner that has spawned several retrospective tales, including the widely known version of Joseph-Charles Taché, ‘Cadieux’ (1863), included in his celebrated Forestiers et Voyageurs: Mœurs et légendes canadiennes. Unlike the two previous short-story authors, Taché was a conservative, who was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1847 and later served as deputy minister of agriculture and statistics. As a journalist, he was, like the previous writers, committed to the survival of French culture, and even more than his earlier counterparts to a movement of rayonnement, which Jack Warwick describes as follows: ‘Out of the notion that the civilizing role was an historic truth vested in the French Canadians as a people they made an influential literature which may well have been instrumental in their effective resistance to the assimilation recommended by Durham’ (The Long Journey, 49). Taché’s tale begins, like ‘L’Iroquoise,’ with a chain of narrators, running back into the past, from a stand-in for the author, to the spellbinding story-

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teller Père Michel, to the grizzled former guide Morache, who proclaims that ‘la chose a été vu comme elle est racontée’ (180; the thing was seen just as it is told), to which the author adds an equally authenticating note, stating: ‘Je connais un des descendants du héros de cette histoire, le père André Cadieux, vieillard de 71 ans qui réside sur les bords du Lac Huron. “Cadieux, m’a-t-il dit, était le grand-père de mon grand-père!”’(183; I know one of the descendants of the hero of this story, André Cadieux, an old man of 71 who resides on the banks of Lake Huron. ‘Cadieux,’ he told me, ‘was my grandfather’s grandfather!’) The narrative frame thus anchors and authenticates the tale, whose details do not depend on the vagaries of the particular voyageur happening to tell it. Taché’s tale also displays a considerable integration of Amerindian and voyageur, which, Warwick contends, contributes to the notion of French-Canadian nationalism: ‘The fact that he has much in common with the Indians and is accepted by them, whereas the English are not, gives the voyageur a share in the natural possession of the land … The idea is implicit that this constitutes the kind of discovery and occupation on which rights of possession are founded, and as we have noted earlier, writers like to show that through the voyageur the French Canadians have some sort of legal right to most of North America. It is a right based on a feeling that their occupation was natural, whereas occupation by military and economic force is not’ (55). Indeed, it seems quite natural that the now colonized French Canadian would not only empathize with the earlier colonized Amerindian but also admire several other of his or her12 attributes evident in the works examined here – closeness to nature, ability to decipher signs, resistance to oppression, and capacity for sacrifice – all essential elements for the survival of the national identity at this crucial point of time and also for its preservation throughout history. Cadieux, his Algonquin wife, and their hybrid children, along with several other Algonquin families, had a settlement ‘au Petit rocher de la haute montagne qui est au milieu du portage des Sept-Chutes, en bas de l’Ile du Grand Calumet: c’est là qu’est la fosse de Cadieux dont tout le monde a entendu parler’ (172; at Little Rock near the high mountain, which is in the middle of the Sept-Chutes portage at the end of Grand Calumet Island: it’s there that is found the burial place of Cadieux, which everyone has heard of). Like Louise’s rock and Caroline’s gravestone, Taché’s Little Rock serves as a cultural reference and rallying point, marked here visually by the author’s use of italics, and like the burial stones in previous tales, it also serves as a memorial to Cadieux’s ‘périlleuse mais généreuse mission’

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(174; perilous but generous mission). When the settlement hears of an impending Iroquois attack, Cadieux and an Algonquin friend, ‘un jeune Algonquin dans le courage et la fidélité duquel il avait une parfaite confiance’ (174; a young Algonquin in whose courage and faithfulness he had perfect confidence), divert the enemy while their families make their way through the treacherous rapids, praying to Saint Anne and guided, according to Cadieux’s wife, by a ‘Great Lady in white’ who hovered over the canoes and showed them the way (175). The group makes it to the safety of the fort at Lac des Deux Montagnes, near Montreal, and then sends a party of three comrades back to rescue their saviours. The Algonquin brave is found scalped, but there is no sign of Cadieux until he is located in a shallow grave marked by a wooden cross, constructed by Cadieux himself, who holds a piece of birch bark, on which he has recounted his adventures, in verse no less. This famous ‘Complainte de Cadieux’ is published in its entirety (forty-four verses) with the tale (180–2), following a full-page exegesis by the narrator. If, in fact, the ‘Complainte’ is a transcription of a traditional song, sung by many a voyageur over the years, as Taché claims, it is a significant pre-Romantic treatment of the wilderness as an ambivalent phenomenon; that is, as welcoming as it is forbidding. The song begins with the well-known phrase ‘Petit rocher de la HauteMontagne’ (Little Rock near the High Mountain), describing and delimiting the burial place (‘petit rocher’) set against the backdrop of the vast wilderness (‘haute montagne’). And it is the text of the ‘Complainte’ that continues to mark the burial place: ‘On prit la coutume d’entretenir une copie de cette complainte, aussi écrite sur de l’écorce, attachée à un arbre voisin de la tombe de Cadieux.’ (183; One adopted the custom of maintaining a copy of this song, also written on bark, attached to a tree near Cadieux’s tomb.) Thus, for Taché, it is both the place and the tale it spawns that serve as memorials, a link that he underscores in his initial address to the reader: ‘Beaucoup de mes lecteurs, qui ont déjà entendu parler de ces histoires, qui ont visité les lieux témoins des scènes que je raconte, retrouveront dans ces récits des réminiscences qui, j’en suis certain, ne seront pas pour eux sans charmes.’ (16; Many of my readers, who have already heard tell of these stories, who have visited the places that witnessed the scenes I recount, will find in these tales reminiscences that, I am certain, will not be without charm for them.) Not without charm, and not without cultural significance. Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté’s La mort de Cadieux, 1907 (figure 2.2), painted at another period of intense French-Canadian nationalism

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2.2 Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, La mort de Cadieux, 1907. Huile sur toile, 89,4 x 119,4 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1952.51. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac / The Death of Cadieux, 1907. Oil on canvas, 89.4 x 119.4 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1952.51. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac.

(see chapter five), displays the same intent to consecrate a national hero that we saw in Taché’s tale: Suzor-Coté’s painting is seen from an elevated viewpoint, which flattens and compresses space to focus on the human drama. Cadieux’s reclining body stands out by its central position on the canvas, the handsome countenance of the martyred hero, and the gestures of the hands, the left one grasping his heart as if to feel its final beat. The white and red patches of his shirt and doublet contrast with the earth tones of his other clothing and the varied colours and intricate weave of the foliage, rendered in divided and diversified strokes, which enlighten and

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enliven the scene, as does the intermittent blue of the river that penetrates and illuminates the scene. Most of all, the diagonal position of the body, criss-crossed by Cadieux’s rifle, leads the eye towards the tree on which his head rests, then up to the manuscript containing his poem, which, elevated and flanked as it is by the bold blue patches of colour, becomes a major feature, if not a final focal point, of the composition. There is no cross, no shallow grave, only the lush foliage, which cradles the dead body of the hero, the majestic tree that shelters him, and the highlighted text that immortalizes him. Whereas the ending of Taché’s tale is rendered in a style that is purposely clumsy, to emphasize its authenticity, Suzor-Coté’s painting is striking in its artistry, a pagan glorification of nature and artistic ritual, which elevates Cadieux into the higher realm of art that memorializes him. La chasse-galerie The prominence of the canoe in the previous tales recalls another famous legend featured in the late nineteenth-century short story, that of La chasse-galerie, transcribed from the oral tradition by Honoré Beaugrand and illustrated by Henri Julien in 1892.13 Set in the nineteenth century, not the French colonial period, and devoid of any overt Amerindian presence, Beaugrand’s tale is so different from that of the Cadieux legend as to defy any claim of a direct link. Nonetheless, at the same time, that very difference and lack of influence may well suggest the significance of the canoe as a transcendent cultural icon, not linked to a specific place, event, tale, text, or movement, but directly to the French-Canadian people and inherited, after all, from the Amerindian way of life. Indeed, if, as Ouellet, Beaulieu, and Tremblay contend, traits like ‘l’esprit de liberté, l’estime de soi, l’instabilité, l’indiscipline, l’impulsivité’ (65–6; the spirit of freedom, self-esteem, instability, lack of discipline, impulsiveness) are inherited from the Amerindian, then Beaugrand’s characters provide a striking example of the ‘Indianization’ of the French Canadian. In a short preface, while acknowledging that his tale is ‘basé sur une croyance populaire qui remonte à l’époque des coureurs des bois’ (based on a popular belief that goes back to the time of the coureurs de bois), Beaugrand claims that he has ‘rencontré plus d’un vieux voyageur qui affirmait avoir vu voguer dans l’air des canots d’écorce’ (19; met more than one voyageur who affirms having seen birchbark canoes flying in the air). Beaugrand thus collapses time or compresses various

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layers of time into the imaginary and transcendent zone of the legendary and extends the legend beyond any individual hero to the populace itself. The story, told by Joe (the cook at a lumber camp), is a personal ‘reminiscence’ set in the recent, not remote, past (1858); it is in fact a pretend past masking the imagination, or as François Ricard aptly puts it, ‘le déplacement temporel masque un autre déplacement beaucoup plus radical: le passage du réel au fabuleux, de la vie à l’imaginaire.’ (10; the temporal displacement masks a much more radical displacement: the passage from reality to fable, from real life to the imaginary.) Joe recounts his tale to his fellow loggers, huddled around the camp stove drinking rum in a cabin surrounded by the vast wilderness and trapped by the snow on New Year’s Eve. Beaugrand evokes effects of light and shadow to stimulate the imagination of his readers and Joe’s listeners (22), who are of working-class origin, in the employ of the absent and anonymous ‘bourgeois’ (21). Joe’s argot-laden tale involves a similar setting and circumstance some thirty-five years earlier, when, after having fallen into a drunken stupor, he is awakened by one Baptiste Durand, who proposes a trip back to their village of Lavaltrie, in the Saint Lawrence valley, to wish their ‘blondes’ a happy New Year. Since the trip would normally take two months in such snow, Joe understands that Baptiste means taking the flying canoe, la chasse-galerie, which involves a deal with the Devil, who will win the traveller’s soul if certain conditions aren’t met: ‘Il s’agit tout simplement de ne pas prononcer le nom de Dieu pendant tout le trajet, et de ne pas s’accrocher aux croix des clochers en voyageant.’ (24; It is quite simply a matter of not pronouncing the name of God during the entire trip and not getting caught on the steeple crosses while travelling.) These are no small tasks for the drunken woodsmen, but with seven companions, Joe is convinced to take the risk. The bird’s-eye view of the vast landscape from the flying canoe is depicted in some detail, only parts of which are given here: Pendant un quart d’heure, environ, nous naviguâmes au-dessus de la forêt sans apercevoir autre chose que les bouquets des grands pins noirs. Il faisait une nuit superbe et la lune dans son plein, illuminait le firmament comme un beau soleil du midi … Nous aperçumes bientôt une éclaircie, c’était la Gatineau dont la surface glacée et polie étincelait au-dessous de nous comme un immense miroir. Puis, p’tit-à-p’tit nous aperçumes des lumières dans les maisons d’habitants; puis des clochers d’églises qui reluisaient comme des baïonnettes de soldats, quand ils font l’exercice sur le

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Although the situation is, of course, imaginary, the scene itself involves real places depicted in a highly visual manner, from the repeated designation of the viewpoint (‘Nous aperçumes,’ ‘nous aperçumes,’ ‘nous apercevions,’ ‘nous vîmes’) to the description of luminous effects, which delimit various sections of the landscape and take the spectator from the wilderness (‘la lune,’ ‘illuminait le firmament’), to the river (‘une éclaircie, c’était la Gatineau dont la surface glacée et polie étincelait’), to the first signs of civilization (‘des lumières dans les maisons

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d’habitants’), to Montreal (‘les mille lumières de la grande ville’), to their final destination (‘les deux flèches argentées de Lavaltrie’). Thanks to the elevated (albeit imaginary) viewpoint, the landscape can be seen and depicted as extremely complex, involving far more than the simple juxtaposition of nature and culture that has characterized previous texts. Here we progress from nature (‘bouquets des grands pins noirs’) to a complex set of cultural spaces involving a new opposition between the city, Montreal, and the country – that is, between culture (‘les mille lumières de la grande ville’) and agriculture (‘les lumières dans les maisons d’habitants’). This new configuration of the landscape captures the structure of contemporary French-Canadian society, as does the telling of the tale by the workers in the employ of the ‘bourgeois,’ whose avatars appear in the streets of Montreal gaping at the flying canoe (‘des groupes s’arrêter dans les rues pour nous voir passer’). Thanks also to the movement of the canoe, of the imagination, of the text itself, which, unlike a painting, evolves over time, Beaugrand is able to depict a highly hybrid landscape reflecting the complex layers of French-Canadian identity. Moreover, set against the vast landscape, the canoe is itself a place of culture (albeit popular), a nexus of shared values, efforts, and conversation, beginning with a common legend and accompanying chant and culminating with the collective singing of a song, transcribed over a full page, the subject of which is none other than the ‘Canot d’écorce qui vole’ (27–8). Like Cadieux, the canoe has its own song and becomes itself a cultural icon capable of emitting its own source of illumination: ‘laissant derrière nous comme une traînée d’étincelles.’ The voyageurs, having danced the night away with their ‘blondes,’ must return to the camp, guided by Joe himself since Baptiste had broken their common vow not to drink and thus imperils their journey, much to the Devil’s delight. Despite a crash into the pine trees near the camp, caused by the drunken Baptiste, the travellers awaken the next morning with only a few bruises. For his enrapt listeners, Joe adds the moral that they should avoid the chasse-galerie, ‘surtout si vous avez un maudit ivrogne qui se mêle de gouverner’ (35; especially if you have a damned drunkard who tries to steer), a false moral to be sure, for what intrepid French Canadian will not take a drink, will not take a risk for his ‘blonde,’ and will not become again, like his ancestors, a voyageur, if only in the realm of the imagination, transcending the wilderness and sharing a song or a tale with his comrades?14 In short, like the canoe, the tale itself is a cultural place that transcends not only nature but the obstacles imposed by conflicting cultural imperatives, such as the economic necessity of having to leave

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the farm in winter to work in the lumber camps, in the employ of the ‘bourgeois.’ In the sense that through its narrative frame and its landscape depiction Beaugrand’s tale represents the social order of late nineteenth-century French Canada, one might say that this most ‘surrealistic’ of the stories we have examined is also the most ‘realistic’ and certainly the most ‘modern.’ This illustration for the chasse-galerie (1892) by Henri Julien, a noted caricaturist and painter of rural customs,15 captures the cultural significance of Beaugrand’s rendition of the legend (figure 2.3): Hovering at the centre of a sky lit by the moon to the left and dotted by stars, the canoe is atilt yet afloat, narrowly avoiding an elevated section of Mount Royal in the lower left foreground, while passing over Montreal with the highly recognizable twin towers of Notre Dame cathedral silhouetted against the Saint Lawrence in the centre far ground and the highly unique Victoria bridge crossing the river to the right. Again the landscape is, as with Beaugrand’s description, a complex mixture of nature, the city, and the countryside, which Julien, limited to spatial, not temporal, configurations, captured by juxtaposing planes, each representing a different social sector of the landscape. In the prow the intrepid voyageur urges his motley crew to collective effort to attain their common and elusive goal. Suspended above the vast landscape, whose natural setting is dotted with signs of civilization, the canoe itself become a cultural place, which represents not only the displacement from reality to imagination identified by Ricard, but especially a place of collective values – camaraderie, defiance, and determination – which define the French Canadian. Moreover, the image itself, like the canoe it represents, became a cultural icon so popular that Julien went on to execute a version in oil, which graces the walls of Le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.16 Set in the recent not remote past, focused on a group not an individual, motivated by secular not religious values, with an adversary from another class not race, the legend of the chasse-galerie portrays, nonetheless, a struggle for identity depicted through the landscape, which juxtaposes a defined cultural place set against and thus set off by a vast landscape. In this case, the landscape reveals the various segments of French-Canadian society, an opposition that we can further explore in the nineteenth-century novel (chapters three and four), which, as the name of the genre implies, is oriented more toward the ‘new,’ the contemporary, than is the short story, decidedly turned towards a more glorious past, personified especially by the missionary, the Amerindian, and the voyageur.

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2.3 Henri Julien, La Chasse-galerie, 1892. Encre, craie, gouache et lavis sur papier, 30,4 x 47,5 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1934.602, don de Charles-Joseph Simard en 1928 ou 1929. Photo: Patrick Altman / The Flying Canoe, 1892. Ink, chalk, gouache and wash on paper, 30.4 x 47.5 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1934.602, gift of Charles-Joseph Simard in 1928 or 1929. Photo: Patrick Altman.

Chapter Three

The Father’s Land Lost: Country versus City in the Early Novel

Like the first short stories (chapter two) and Garneau’s historical writing (chapter one), the French-Canadian novel arose during the tumultuous period of the 1830s and ‘40s and, to a large degree, reflects the issues it engendered, which in turn influence the particular form (or formlessness) taken by the novel, as Réjean Robidoux and André Renaud argue: Le roman canadien-français a pris, dès son apparition, une direction très précise. Sa naissance, dans les années troubles où fut institué le régime politique de l’Union des Canadas, coïncide avec une prise de conscience nationale … Les romanciers devaient se conformer avant tout à l’impératif d’une mission para-littéraire, utilisant le roman comme un genre multiple où la fiction se mêlait avec plus ou moins de bonheur à l’histoire, à la politique, au journalisme. [22; The French-Canadian novel took a very precise direction from its inception. Its birth, in the troubled years when the political regime of the union of Canadas was instituted, coincides with an awakening of national consciousness. Novelists had to conform above all to the imperative of a para-literary mission, using the novel as a multiple genre where fiction mixed more or less successfully with history, politics, journalism.]

If the early short story tends to turn towards the past and portray a struggle for survival against the wilderness and the Amerindian, the novel, as suggested by its name, focuses on the new, the contemporary, and sees the struggle for personal, family, and national identity (inevitably conjoined) largely as a matter of economics, with the bourgeois and the British becoming the principal adversaries. Whoever or whatever the combatants, the struggle invariably involves the land – the

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homestead, set off by the wilderness and against the city – and is thus conveyed through the representation of the landscape, again characterized by the juxtaposition of nature and culture. Moreover, in the two novels explored in this chapter, as well as in certain parallel paintings by Joseph Légaré and Cornelius Krieghoff, culture generally assumes the form of agriculture. Patrice Lacombe’s La terre paternelle (1846) and Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau’s Charles Guérin (1846–53) have been designated not only as the first ‘rural’ or ‘agrarian’ novels, but also as uniquely French Canadian.1 But, when the two novels are looked at together with a focus on the landscape, what appears as most uniquely French Canadian is the loss of the father’s land (‘la terre paternelle’), a loss whose significance we attempt to probe throughout this chapter. La terre paternelle: Culture and Agriculture Patrice Lacombe’s La terre paternelle (1846), as the title implies, highlights the land as the primary repository of identity, both personal (through the family) and national (through agriculture). In this sense, it is emblematic not only of the rural novel, but also of the nineteenthcentury French-Canadian novel in general, dedicated as it was to preserving the survival of the race through the advocacy of country life (see Servais-Maquoi, 10). Recounted by a third-person narrator, who doesn’t hesitate to make his presence and opinions known by addressing the reader directly, the novel begins by locating a specific ‘place’ called ‘Gros-Sault’ on the northern part of the île de Montréal, whose surroundings are then presented as a visual spectacle, indeed a painting. The literary canvas itself unfurls progressively, extending over several paragraphs, beginning with a description of the natural setting: La branche de l’Outaouais qui, en cet endroit, prend le nom de ‘Rivière des Prairies’ y roule ses eaux impétueuses et profondes, jusqu’au bout de l’île, où elle les réunit à celles du Saint-Laurent. Une forêt de beaux arbres respectés du temps et de la hache du cultivateur, couvre dans une grande étendue, la côte et le rivage. Quelques-uns, déracinés en partie par la force du courant, se penchent sur les eaux, et semblent se mirer dans le cristal limpide qui baigne leurs pieds. Une riche pelouse s’étend comme un beau tapis vert sous ces arbres dont la cime touffue offre une ombre impénétrable aux ardeurs du soleil. [27; The branch of the Ottawa River which, at

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Literature and Painting in Quebec this place, is named ‘Rivière des Prairies’ rolls its deep and impetuous waters up to the end of the island, where it joins those of the Saint Lawrence. A forest of beautiful trees respected by time and the peasant’s axe, covers a large expanse of the sloping shore. A few, partly uprooted by the force of the current, bend over the waters, and seem to see their reflection in the limpid crystal that bathes their feet. A rich lawn stretches like a beautiful carpet under these trees whose tufted tops offer shade impenetrable by the sun’s ardours.]

The vast space (‘grande étendue’) of the verbal canvas is one of beauty and harmony more than of violence and destruction. Despite the natural corrosiveness of time and the invasion of the farmer’s axe, even those trees most threatened by the force of the current are reflected in the crystal waters bathing their feet, the personification, like the metaphor invoking the ‘beau tapis vert’ serving to humanize and harmonize the scene for the spectator, whose presence is already implied by the shade ‘offered’ by the forest as shelter from the ardours of the sun. We are, indeed, far removed from the ‘wilderness’ or ‘la grande nature’ (see Sirois, ‘De l’idéologie’), and the next paragraph in La terre paternelle indicates to what extent ‘nature’ has been socialized by economic forces: ‘L’industrie a su autrefois tirer parti du cours rapide de cette rivière, dont les eaux alimentent encore aujourd’hui deux moulins.’ (28; In the past, industry managed to take advantage of the rapid flow of this river, whose waters still today power two mills.) The following paragraph brings nature and culture together by emphasizing their peaceful coexistence, in a presentation that is increasingly painterly: Le bourdonnement sourd et majestueux des eaux; l’apparition inattendue d’un large radeau chargé de bois entraîné avec rapidité, au milieu des cris de joie des hardis conducteurs; les habitations des cultivateurs situées sur les deux rives opposées, à des intervalles presque réguliers, et qui se détachent agréablement sur le vert sombre des arbres qui les environnent, forment le coup d’œil le plus satisfaisant pour le spectateur. Ce lieu charmant ne pouvait pas manquer d’attirer l’attention des amateurs de la belle nature; aussi, chaque année, pendant la chaude saison, est-il le rendez-vous d’un grand nombre d’habitants de Montréal, qui viennent s’y délasser, pendant quelques heures, des fatigues de la semaine, et échanger l’atmosphère lourde et brûlante de la ville, contre l’air pur et frais qu’on y respire. [28; The heavy majestic hum of the waters; the unexpected appearance of

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a large raft loaded with wood moving rapidly amidst the joyous cries of its hardy crew; the peasants’ dwellings, situated on both banks at nearly regular intervals, define themselves nicely against the deep green of the surrounding trees; all form a most pleasing spectacle for the spectator. This charming place could not fail to attract the attention of nature lovers; thus, every year, in the hot season, it becomes the rendezvous of many a resident of Montreal, who come to relax, for a few hours, from the tiring work week, and exchange the heavy, burning atmosphere of the city, for the pure, fresh air to be breathed there.]

The description remains highly visual with its designation of a viewpoint (‘coup d’œil’) and even a viewer (‘spectateur’) and its notation of colour and tone (‘le vert sombre des arbres’), emphasized by the use of the nominal form, which transforms the colour, normally expressed by an adjective, into a noun, which then precedes and takes precedence over the objects themselves. The charming scene can’t fail to attract the attention of nature lovers (‘les amateurs de la belle nature’), yet it is not a matter of pure nature, but one marked by the imprint of culture: the powerful grandeur of the wilderness (‘Le bourdonnement sourd et majestueux des eaux’) is complemented by traces of commerce (‘un large radeau chargé de bois’) and finally the farmers’ dwellings (‘les habitations des cultivateurs’), neatly arranged in contrasting groups that lend the composition its symmetry (‘situés sur les deux rives opposées’), regularity (‘à des intervalles réguliers’), and location in a plane (‘qui se détachent agréablement’) set off by the encompassing natural setting (‘le vert sombre des arbres qui les environnent’). This unified yet varied setting balances all of the natural and cultural components into a homogeneous whole, which then stands in opposition to the city (‘l’atmosphère lourde et brûlante de la ville’), precisely what the spectator seeks to escape. The lengthy description concludes with yet another paragraph, which narrows in on a particular farm: ‘Parmi toutes les habitations des cultivateurs qui bordent l’île de Montréal, en cet endroit, une se fait remarquer par son bon état de culture, la propreté et la belle tenue de la maison et les divers bâtiments qui la composent.’ (28; Among all the peasants’ homes on the outskirts of the île de Montréal, at this place one stands out by the good state of its crops, the cleanliness and neatness of the house and various out buildings.) This specific site (‘cet endroit’) and sight (‘qui … se fait remarquer’), set off by the vast space of the hybrid landscape and distinguished by its order (‘bon état’) is the place

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of residence of the main characters, which launches the telling of their story and lends it verisimilitude.2 Indeed, the components laid out in the initial landscape and developed throughout come to govern the spectrum of characters and the structure of the plot for the entire short novel, as Antoine Sirois contends, albeit somewhat regretfully: ‘Le passage d’un lieu physique à l’autre et non l’évolution intérieure des personnages engendre les péripéties.’ (‘Espace,’ 64; The passage from one physical location to another, not the interior evolution of the characters, engenders the turn of events.) The first detail that we learn about the land is that it has always been in the same family, which can trace its occupation progressively, through a succession of ancestors from Jean Chauvin, a sergeant in one of the first French regiments sent to this area and the farm’s first concessionary as of 1670, to Jean-Baptiste Chauvin, its present occupant. The unbroken family chain of owners running from the past to the present is not unlike the cascade of narrators in stories like L’Iroquoise, and it serves, as in the tales, to construct a sort of memorial, here to the Chauvin family, but also to the larger categories of French (‘un des premiers régiments français’) and French Canadians (‘en ce pays’) that it represents. The present generation of the Chauvin family consists of Jean-Baptiste, his wife, referred to primarily by her family role, ‘la mère Chauvin,’ an elder son named for the father, a younger son, Charles, and a daughter, Marguerite. Linked together by the land, the family lives in perfect peace, unity, prosperity, and happiness: ‘Heureux, oh! trop heureux les habitants des campagnes, s’ils connaissaient leur bonheur!’ (30; Happy, oh! Too happy are the country folk, if they realized their happiness!) This unbridled happiness, which the author (himself a notary for the religious order of Sulpicians, not a farmer!) has the narrator extol and exalt, is to be, as the condition (‘si’) suggests, short-lived. Through a combination of natural and economic forces, the mother and Charles, after selling their goods at the market, are stranded in the city by a February snowstorm. Sequestered at a neighbouring inn, Charles overhears a series of conversations between young men who have just signed up with the North West Company, engaged in fur trading, and several veterans, who tell their tales of adventure, capturing the imagination of the enrapt Charles: ‘D’ailleurs, la passion pour ces courses aventureuses (qui heureusement s’en va diminuant de jour en jour) était alors comme une tradition de famille, et remontait à la formation de ces diverses compagnies qui, depuis la découverte du pays, se sont partagés successivement le commerce des pelleteries.’ (34–5; By

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the way, the passion for these adventurous travels (which happily is diminishing daily) was then like a family tradition, going back to the founding of these various companies, which, since the discovery of our country, successively shared the fur trade.) In effect, the role of voyageur, like that of habitant, is linked to the most remote annals of the French-Canadian identity, and the former, like the latter, can be considered ‘comme une tradition de famille.’ Despite the narrator’s admonitions to the reader that such voyageurs usually return exhausted, penniless, and ‘incapables, pour la plupart, de cultiver la terre ou de s’adonner à quelque autre métier sédentaire profitable pour eux et utile à leurs concitoyens’ (35; incapable, for the most part, of farming the land or taking up another sedentary trade, which would be profitable for them and useful to their fellow citizens), Charles heeds the call of the wild, that of his cultural avatars if not familial ancestors, and decides to enlist in the North West Company. His distraught mother arms him with an ancient medal, notable for its symbolic ambivalence, with Saint Anne, the patron saint of voyageurs (she who guided the canoe in Cadieux) on one side and the images of Mary and Jesus, representing family solidarity, on the other, a solidarity broken symbolically when the departing Charles casts a pebble at the faithful family dog to keep him from following. Charles’s departure not only diminishes the Chauvin family, it disrupts its traditional ordering, since the father, now fearing the departure of his elder son, decides to give him control of the family farm in exchange for a pension, loaded with strict conditions, detailed not only to document country mores but also to show the growing rapacity of the father. As Ouellet, Beaulieu, and Tremblay contend, the pattern of family disruption is typical of the rural novel: ‘Le roman de la terre raconte habituellement une rupture: aucun fils ne peut ou ne veut prendre la succession du père.’ (69; The rural novel habitually recounts a rupture: no son can or will continue his father’s heritage.) Such disruption may well seem paradoxical in a genre that extols family solidarity, and we shall return to its possible significance in due course. After five years of family squabbles and financial failures, the father and son decide to re-establish the previous arrangement, and the father’s land is returned to him. However, the previous order is far from restored: ‘On cherchait en vain au milieu d’eux le même bonheur et la même harmonie qu’autrefois.’ (55; In vain did they seek among them the same happiness and harmony as in the past.) The farm itself has deteriorated under the son’s mismanagement, and the father has lost his

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energy and motivation after a long period of inactivity. Indeed, he had enjoyed his status above that of the lowly farmer so much that he now imagines himself as a merchant, an equal of the priest, the doctor, and the notary, and constituting among the four of them the village ‘aristocracy’ (56). In short, he seeks to detach himself from farmers and the farm, which he rents out, and for some time his new affairs flourish, until the family is ruined by a crop shortage and financial debts exacerbated by a moneylender, ‘fléau plus nuisible et plus redoutable aux cultivateurs que tous les ravages ensemble de la mouche et de la rouille’ (57; a scourge more harmful and more dreaded by the peasant than all the ravages together of insects and disease). Finally, ‘la terre paternelle, sur laquelle les ancêtres de Chauvin avaient dormi pendant de si longues années, fut foulée par les pas d’un étranger.’ (58; the paternal land, on which Chauvin’s ancestors had slept for so many long years, fell under the footsteps of a foreigner.) The word ‘étranger’ can mean both stranger and foreigner, and its meaning will be clarified later in the novel; it is not difficult, however, even at this point to see in the family’s dispossession a reflection of the French-Canadian nation after the Conquest. When we rejoin the Chauvin family ten years later, they are prey to the same combination of forces that initiated their undoing; they now subsist in dire poverty, as a detailed description of their humble dwelling in a harsh neighbourhood of Montreal attests. Chauvin and his son, with no other training or education, have become humble water bearers, and the narrator is quick to point out that Chauvin’s situation is far from unique: ‘Il avait en cela imité l’exemple d’autres cultivateurs qui, chassés de leurs terres par les mauvaises récoltes et attirés à la ville par l’espoir de gagner leur vie, en s’employant aux nombreux travaux qui s’y font depuis quelques années, sont venus s’y abattre en grand nombre, et ont presque doublé la population de nos faubourgs.’ (61; In that he had imitated the example of other peasants who, chased from their land by poor harvests and attracted to the city by the hope of earning their livelihood by assuming one of the numerous tasks undertaken there for some time, had come to rest there in large numbers, almost doubling the population of our suburbs.) Far from a personal drama, the situation of the Chauvin family represents a national tragedy, caused by economic and climatic forces and leading to a dis-place-ment from the welcoming countryside to the forbidding city, a contrast Sirois likens to that between ‘Eden and Babylon’ (29). In a fascinating rereading of the novel, usually seen as a reactionary tract upholding rural resignation, Bernard Andrès interprets the family’s

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fall as an allusion to the economic reprisals following the failed patriots’ rebellions, precisely the time frame encompassed by the title of chapter seven, ‘Dix ans après’ (ten years later), which creates what Andrès terms a ‘hole’ (trou) in the novel’s plot, occulted by the narrator (373). When the son succumbs to a fatal illness, ‘la misère’ (63; poverty), even the gravedigger haggles about how much money it will take for a church ceremony, and the penniless Chauvin is finally obliged to see his son put to rest in a pauper’s grave. Clearly the city, unlike the country, is governed by market values not moral ones, and the Chauvin’s only friend is an old voyageur, Danis, untouched by city values, and characterized by his good nature, honesty, and generosity (68). The reintroduction of the role of voyageur is far from gratuitous, as the narrator then invites the reader to leave the city squalor and shifts the scene abruptly to the wilderness north of the city: Avec la permission de nos lecteurs, nous leur ferons faire un agréable petit voyage à la Pointe-aux-Anglais, à quelques milles au-dessus du village du lac des Deux-Montagnes, et nous les ramènerons dans les deux canots qui viennent de paraître à l’horizon. Partis du poste du GrandPortage sur le lac Supérieur, depuis près d’un mois, ils avaient traversé une longue suite de lacs, de forêts et de rivières, sans presque rencontrer d’autres traces de civilisation que quelques croix de bois plantées sur la côte vis-à-vis des rapides, et qui y avaient été placées par d’anciens voyageurs, pour léguer à leurs futurs compagnons de voyage l’histoire affligeante de quelques naufrages arrivés en ces endroits. [71; With our readers’ permission, we’ll take them on a short, pleasant trip to Pointe-aux-Anglais, a few miles above the village of Lake of Two Mountains, and lead them to the two canoes that have just appeared on the horizon. Having left the trading post at Grand-Portage on Lake Superior, about a month ago, they had crossed a series of lakes, forests, and rivers, almost without encountering any traces of civilization other than a few crosses planted on the shore opposite the rapids, erected by former voyageurs to leave to their future successors a reminder of canoe accidents that had happened in these places.]

The description captures perfectly the juxtaposition of the vast space of the wilderness (‘une longue suite de lacs, de forêts et de rivières’) with specific places (‘croix de bois’) that serve as memorials (‘léguer … l’histoire’), which characterized the landscapes of numerous short stories of the early nineteenth century. Here, however, the voyageurs push

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on towards an encounter with the contemporary landscape, itself marked by personal ‘sites of memory’ (‘le lieu de leur enfance’): ‘Ils venaient d’apercevoir le clocher d’église de la mission du lac qui resplendissait alors des feux du soleil levant. Cette vue rappelait en eux de bien doux souvenirs; chacun croyait voir le clocher de son village; encore un pas et ils allaient revoir le lieu de leur enfance.’ (72; They had just seen the church steeple of the mission on the lake gleaming in the rays of the rising sun. This view reminded them of very sweet memories; each thought he saw the steeple in his village; one more step and they would see again the place of their childhood.) When the picturesque portrait of a particularly striking anonymous voyageur ends with the detail of a necklace suggesting a medallion (74), the reader, by now, like the Amerindian, the voyageur, or the farmer, an adept reader of signs, can deduce that it is Charles. This identification is confirmed when he heads for Gros-Sault, only to find the family farm inhabited by ‘un étranger.’ This time, as Charles (now identified by the narrator) ‘comprit tout: son père s’était ruiné, sa terre était vendue, et l’étranger était insolemment assis au foyer paternel’ (75; understood everything: his father was ruined, his land sold, and the foreigner seated insolently at the paternal hearth), the reader also understands through a dialogue in broken French that the stranger is an Englishman, who takes his place alongside the city dweller as archenemy of the French Canadian.3 As Charles searches the city for his family, he comes across Danis, who leads him to their hovel, and despite his change in appearance, they recognize him by a more certain sign, his medal, and all, even the rebuffed dog, welcome him back with open arms (or paws). Used to the freedom of the wilderness, Charles stifles in the city, and vows to return to the countryside, which is accomplished when ‘le nouveau propriétaire de la terre de Chauvin paya à son tour le tribut à la nature’ (79; the new owner of Chauvin’s land in turn paid his tribute to nature); that is, the new owner falls victim himself to the forces of economics (‘paya’) and nature (‘la nature’). Having saved his money and having remained faithful to his family (unlike many a voyageur, as the narrator previously warned), Charles is able to purchase the farm and return there with his family, along with Danis and his wife, who all recover their health thanks to the pure country air and, with the spouses of Charles and Marguerite, carry on the family tradition, reintegrated into ‘la terre paternelle’ (80). Although the ending recalls that of Voltaire’s Candide, where a similarly displaced group of characters learns that ‘il faut cultiver notre

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jardin’ (we must cultivate our garden), the narrator, speaking for the author, rails against readers who might wish for a more dramatic ending, contending that ‘nous les prions de remarquer que nous écrivons dans un pays où les mœurs en général sont pures et simples … laissons aux vieux pays, que la civilisation a gâtés, leurs romans ensanglantés’ (80; we beg them to note that we are writing in a country where the mores in general are pure and simple … let’s leave the bloodied novels to the old countries, which civilization has spoiled). We further note that ‘civilization’ seems linked to the city, unlike ‘culture,’ which is found in the countryside, where personal and national roots can flourish and traditions persist, and that the text itself is the guarantor of that cultural continuity. The narrator even claims to visit the family and allows Chauvin to formulate the novel’s would-be moral: ‘Nous aimons à visiter quelquefois cette brave famille, et à entendre répéter souvent au père Chauvin, que la plus grande folie que puisse faire un cultivateur, c’est de se donner à ses enfants, d’abandonner la culture de son champ, et d’emprunter aux usuriers.’ (81; We enjoy visiting this brave family occasionally and listening to Chauvin repeat often that the greatest folly that a peasant can commit is to give way to his children, stop cultivating his land, and borrow from moneylenders.) This lesson would surely please the conservative, church-controlled wing of the French-Canadian elite at that time, determined as it was to consolidate its power, not in the British-controlled marketplace, but in the family and the countryside, where agriculture, sustained by religion, perpetuates national identity.4 A standard interpretation of the rural novel as a genre, as formulated by André Vanasse in his introduction to the novel, is that there are two wrong ways out of country life: ‘L’une s’ouvre sur la forêt, l’autre sur la ville … La forêt tue … La ville, elle, rapetisse l’existence.’ (18; One opens onto the forest, the other onto the city …The forest kills … The city diminishes existence.) Yet, if in La terre paternelle the city does reduce existence, can we not also say that in this case the forest, far from killing, enriches life? As the peasant family falls prey to the temptations of money and reduces itself by squabbles and poor investments, Charles seems reinvigorated – physically, morally, and financially – by his experience in the wilderness, which seems a natural ally of the countryside against the negative power of the city, just as alliance with one’s national ancestors, the voyageurs, seems to complement allegiance to one’s familial ancestors, the habitants, against the bourgeois and the British. Lacombe remains relatively silent concerning Charles’s side of

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the story, having the narrator state simply that the telling of Charles’s adventures will have to await another day (79), but does his footnote concerning the former Saint-Anne rapids, recently replaced by locks (‘l’art a défiguré l’ouvrage de la nature’[73; art has disfigured the work of nature]), and the fact that Danis educates the Chauvin children by singing old voyageur songs not counterweigh the narrator’s earlier invectives against the wilderness and those voyageurs who squander their savings and abandon their families (unlike Charles and Danis)?5 Paul Perron’s assessment of the role of space in constructing identity strikes me as particularly apt for this novel: ‘In the agrarian novel, the village and the city are forbidden, negative spaces. They are the there, the elsewhere, the contingent, the impossible, which dissolve the subject into an ego defining itself in and by its own desires. The wilderness, on the other hand, is a mixed space, the beyond, where most often the subject is absorbed, but can return to invigorate and even save the nuclear unit of society, the family’ (164). Indeed, the landscape in La terre paternelle, like the story itself, seems to reveal a more complex relationship between space and place, nature and culture, than is usually attributed to the ‘rural novel,’ a complexity that characterizes the ambivalent nature of the French-Canadian identity, as encapsulated by Fernand Dumont: ‘Dans les milieux agricoles souvent confinés, l’appel des grands espaces ne cessera pas de fasciner une partie de la jeunesse; ce qui explique sans doute cette alternance de l’enracinement et du voyage qui restera un trait de la société québécoise.’ (Genèse, 69; In the often confined agricultural milieu, the call of wide-open spaces will not cease to fascinate a portion of the younger generation; which no doubt explains this alternation of entrenchment and travel that will remain a trait of Quebecois society.) In La terre paternelle, ultimately nature and farmland conjoin to defy the city, an alliance also implicit in the painting of the period. Nature and Agriculture in Painting: Légaré Even before the novel, the short story, and Garneau’s historical writing, journalism had emerged as a major vehicle for conveying, preserving, and defending the French-Canadian identity, especially in the early nineteenth century, with the appearance of the patriotic newspaper Le Canadien.6 In 1833 Joseph Légaré was commissioned by Le Canadien to produce an image for its title page, which it kept until 1836 (figure 3.1):

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3.1 Joseph Légaré, Le Canadien, 1833. Huile sur toile, 16,8 x 24 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1972.43, restauration effectuée grâce à une contribution des Amis du Musée du Québec. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac / The Canadian, 1833. Oil on canvas, 16.8 x 24 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1972.43, restoration made possible by a contribution from the Amis du Musée du Québec. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac.

The newspaper’s description of the image emphasizes the multiple components of the landscape: ‘Un Cultivateur Canadien, au milieu de son champ. Ses bœufs et sa charrue sont auprès de lui, et lui-même fume sa pipe, ce qui dans le langage du peuple veut dire la même chose. Dans l’enfoncement on voit le commencement d’un village Canadien et de l’autre côté la perspective se termine par une forêt et des montagnes.’ (A Canadian peasant, in the middle of his field. His cattle and plow are beside him, and he himself smokes his pipe, which, in the language of the people, has a similar meaning. In the distance one sees the beginning of a Canadian village and the other side of the perspective ends

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with a forest and mountains.)7 The announcement contains the tacit implication that the identity of the ‘Canadien’ is intimately bound to and represented by his surroundings. Indeed the habitant in the foreground, wearing the traditional bonnet rouge and smoking his customary pipe (a habit acquired from contact with the Amerindian population), rests while his oxen graze on his land that slopes gently towards the river to the left, which leads the eye to the village, dominated by the traditional clocher d’église (church steeple). The village itself is surrounded in the far ground by the forests and mountains, which complement the bucolic scene, just as the untamed tree, rock, and bush serve to frame the image in the foreground and to remind us of the past struggles that have led to the present comfort. Here culture and nature coexist harmoniously and together define the French-Canadian identity, a product of agriculture, religion, and the past, all anchored in the land. One could argue that this combination of culture and nature is hardly surprising since that’s the way the landscape was in mid-nineteenthcentury Lower Canada (Eastern Canada after 1840), especially in the fertile Saint Lawrence valley, but the question here is one of representation: Lacombe and Légaré, instead of focusing on one or another element, chose a perspective that includes the whole, a choice that, I contend, has a lasting effect on the depiction of the Quebec landscape to this day, precisely because it reflects essential components of the way French Canadians understand their country and themselves. Another such literary ancestor is Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau, himself, like Légaré, an important statesman and patriot.8 Charles Guérin: Country and City Chauveau’s lengthy novel, Charles Guérin: Roman de mœurs canadiennes, first appeared in the Album littéraire et musical de la Revue canadienne in 1846 and was then published in volume form in 1853, making it a direct contemporary of Lacombe’s La terre paternelle. In fact, at first glance, the plots are remarkably similar, involving a paternal property threatened by the disappearance of one son and the relinquishing of authority to the other, whose speculations then lead to financial ruin, dispossession of the family homestead, and displacement of the family from the countryside to the city, where the prodigal son later finds them. Similarities end there, however, as Chauveau’s novel is much longer and far more complex than Lacombe’s, going well beyond the designation of ‘rural novel.’

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First and foremost, Chauveau chooses to focus on the educated French Canadian, whose instruction and ambition should enable him to advance in society, but who finds most avenues limited or closed by the very structure of a system controlled by the British bourgeoisie (see Lemire, ‘Introduction,’ 16). In addition to its broader social context, Charles Guérin features contrasting love interests and friendships for the titular character, relationships that enable Chauveau to explore various professions, mores, and segments of society and thus make the novel, as promised by the subtitle, a ‘roman de mœurs canadiennes.’ Moreover, multiple changes in voice and shifts of perspective, the latter brought out through ‘painterly’ landscape description, lend the novel a relativism and inclusiveness that make it far more modern than La terre paternelle. In the beginning sentences of Charles Guérin, an omniscient narrator, revelling openly in his role as storyteller, presents the two main characters, the sixteen-year-old Charles and his nineteen-year-old brother, Pierre. Set in the recent past (1830), the two young men have just graduated from school and discuss their bleak professional prospects in Canada as they gaze over the landscape from their home in the country. While many critics have commented on Chauveau’s ‘tableaux de mœurs,’9 few have noted the significance of his ‘paysages.’ Not only does the novel begin with a lengthy landscape description, among the most detailed and painterly in all of French-Canadian literature, but the site reappears in various guises at different points in the story, providing the novel with its main structuring and signifying principles. The passage, spanning four pages (37–40), is so lengthy and rich as to warrant dividing it into abbreviated segments, each one corresponding to a different paragraph or part thereof: Chauveau begins by setting the vantage point from which the two brothers view the scene: ‘Fatigués de leurs courses et de leurs discussions, ils étaient assis sur l’herbe tout près de la blanche maison paternelle, et, silencieux, ils contemplaient la nature grandiose qui se déroulait de tous côtés.’ (Tired out by their journeys and discussions, they were seated in the grass near the white paternal house, and, silent, they contemplated the grandiose nature unfurling on all sides.) Chaveau’s painterly manner is readily evident in his systematic use of all the variables of visual art, beginning by identifying the viewpoint (‘ils contemplaient’) and locating it at a specific spot (‘tout près de la blanche maison paternelle’) from which he then lays out the parameters of the surrounding space, which constitute the composition, the spatial arrangement, of his description (‘qui se déroulait de tous côtés’). Once again, the entire

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painting is premised on the juxtaposition of a limited place representing culture (here, as in Lacombe’s novel, the paternal home) and a vast space representing nature (‘la nature grandiose’). Within the now-delineated space, Chauveau then starts to lay in details in the second paragraph: C’était vers la fin d’une belle après-midi du mois de septembre, et l’endroit natal des jeunes Guérin était une des ces riches paroisses de la côte du sud, qui forment une succession si harmonieuse de tous les genres de paysages imaginables, panorama le plus varié qui soit au monde, et qui ne cesse qu’un peu au-dessus de Québec, où commence à se faire sentir la monotonie du district de Montréal. [It was towards the end of a beautiful September afternoon, and the birthplace of the young Guérins was one of those rich parishes on the south coast, which form such a harmonious succession of all imaginable types of landscapes, the most varied panorama that exists in the world, which stops only a little above Quebec, where one begins to sense the monotony of the Montreal region.]

Here, Chauveau notes the specific time of day and month of the year, since both will have an effect on the appearance of the scene, from the quality of the light to the state of the foliage. He also situates the specific geographic location, using local terms (côte du sud) highlighted in italics, which both reinforces local identity for the French-Canadian reader and promotes it for the French or French-speaking reader from elsewhere. Most of all, Chauveau identifies the overall impressions of the scenic view, the principles that will govern the entire landscape description: the vast scope (‘panorama’), the multiplicity (‘tous les genres’), variety (‘varié’), and harmony (‘si harmonieuse’), all of which are at odds with the ‘monotonie’ of the landscape as one approaches Montreal; that is, the very unity that had so appealed to Cartier and Champlain. The third paragraph takes us back from the periphery to the centre, from the plurality of landscapes to the singularity of the paternal property or, in this case, properties, since there are two houses associated with the Guérin family, both suggesting relative ease, but each quite different from the other. The first one, where they live presently, old and a bit decrepit, reflects a former social order, divided into two parts, the higher one for the family, the lower one for the servants or guests. The second, where the deceased patriarch used to live, is of a more modern taste, if taste can be used to describe this heteroclite building

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with ‘vitraux assez mesquins’ (quite mediocre stained-glass windows) and smacking of mercantilism, as suggested by an italicized local expression: magasin (shop). In short, the notion of paternal property is ambivalent and poses the question of just what has happened to separate the family from the father’s residence. The fourth paragraph provides a partial response to the question of ownership, in that the father’s house now belongs to one M Wagnaër, who is identified as a foreigner, yet his nationality is itself somewhat ambiguous, since his name sounds German, but he came from the Channel Islands, which are part of England but have, since the 1789 Revolution, been home to many French refugees. It is, nonetheless, the present home of Madame Guérin, albeit old and decrepit, that radiates stability, with its immense ancient elm (‘un orme séculaire et gigantesque’), itself a symbol of family longevity, which dominates the scene from its situation on an elevated mound of land, from which the two brothers view the landscape. Paragraph five shifts the focus back from the central place of the home to the surrounding space, and from culture to nature: ‘Devant eux coulait le Saint-Laurent, large autant que la vue pouvait porter. Sur l’horizon se dessinaient bien lointaines les formes indécises des montagnes bleuâtres du nord; une petite île verdoyante reposait l’œil au tiers de la distance, et semblait souvent, lorsque les vagues s’agitaient, osciller elle-même, prête à disparaître dans le fleuve.’ (Before them flowed the Saint Lawrence, as wide as the eye could see. On the horizon sketched in the far distance were the indistinct forms of the bluish mountains of the north; a small verdant island relaxed the eye a third of the way off and often, when the waves stirred, seemed itself to oscillate, ready to disappear into the larger river.) The Saint Lawrence River dominates the scene by its very vastness (‘large’) and guides the viewer’s eye (‘la vue’) through the various planes of the composition, from far ground to middle ground. Chauveau uses a painterly metaphor (‘se dessinaient’) to situate the mountains in relation to the horizon, then uses the indeterminate shapes (‘formes indécises’) and vague colour (‘bleuâtre’) of the mountains to suggest their distance. The singular, smaller, more distinctly colourful form of an island (‘une petite île verdoyante’) emerges in the middle ground to reassure the viewers (‘reposait l’œil’), only to fall prey to the action of the waves, which make it seem, visually, to oscillate, then disappear, suggesting at once the power of the wilderness and the fragility of human efforts to seize it, even through perception.

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Paragraph six accentuates the variety of the landscape: La vaste nappe d’eau présentait trois ou quatre aspects différents. La marée montait dans la petite anse au fond de laquelle étaient les deux maisons que nous venons de décrire; la brise s’élevait avec la marée, et l’eau plus épaisse prenait une teinte brune. À droite, on découvrait une grande étendue d’un azur tranquille; à gauche, éclairée par un soleil d’automne, l’eau paraissait comme une large plaque d’argent incrustée d’or; une marque d’écume blanche séparait cette partie de l’autre: c’était l’endroit où une petite rivière traversant un lit de cailloux se jetait dans le fleuve. [The vast sheet of water presented three or four different aspects. The tide rose into the small cove at whose base were the two houses just described; the breeze picked up with the tide, and the thicker water took on a brown tint. To the right, one saw a large expanse of a tranquil azure colour; to the left, lit by the autumn sun, the water appeared like a wide plate of silver incrusted with gold; a mark of white foam separated this part from the other: this was the place where a small river crossing a bed of pebbles went into the river.]

Here, Chauveau returns from the vast river (‘la vaste nappe d’eau’) to the cove where the viewers are located, then reconfigures the scene in terms of space and colour. On the right, towards the open sea, the water is perceived (‘on découvrait’) as a large mass of blue (‘une grande étendue d’un azur tranquille’); on the left, towards the commercial centres of Quebec and Montreal, the water takes on the appearance of a large silver plate incrusted with gold, the colours themselves suggesting commercial interests. In the middle, the dark brown waters of the cove are cut by the white foam of a small river running into the Saint Lawrence and dividing the blue waters on the right from the silver and gold waters on the left. The landscape thus lays out the murky dilemma faced by the brothers, on the cusp of a decision, one of whom will head for the adventure of the open sea (to the right), the other for the lure of financial gain in the city (to the left). If the cove marks a dividing point in the water, it does so also in the surrounding land, as we see in paragraph seven. The two points of land on each side of the cove serve to frame the river as in a painting (‘servaient de cadre au fleuve’), yet again, each point is distinct from the other, continuing the ongoing organization by contrast that characterizes the overall description. The right point of land is lush (‘riche végétation’) and contains the beginnings of a village (‘un groupe de

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maisonnettes’), with a church, whose steeple is highlighted literally (‘étincellait’) by the sun and which is linked by a small road to the house of M Wagnaër. Paragraph eight, the penultimate and longest of the description, describes the surrounding landscape beginning with the left point of the cove, which is itself primarily a sandbar, flanked by the rivière aux Écrevisses, which runs through Madame Guérin’s property, suggesting its potential as the future location of a mill. Beyond this small river, as the land curves into the Saint Lawrence, the view is staggering in its variety (‘une chaîne variée’). The landscape initially appears as sets of contrasting elements, its geometrically traced fields set off by colours of various crops – ‘jaunes, rousses ou vertes’ (yellow, auburn, or green) and set against groves of maples marked by autumnal colours: ‘teintes violettes, rouge feu, orangées’ (tints of violet, fire red, orange). Juxtaposed in the early sentences, the cultural phenomena espouse natural forms in later sentences, as the royal highway follows the topography of the terrain, ‘suivant toutes les sinuosités de la grève’ (following all the curves of the river bank), and villages are ‘suspendus au flanc des montagnes éloignées’ (suspended on the flanks of distant mountains) to the point that they appear superimposed onto the land masses (‘superposés dans toute l’étendue des terres’), including those that bear the imprint of civilization and the name of ‘concessions’ (Chauveau’s italics). While some church steeples, the very symbols of culture, appear in villages, others are depicted in natural surroundings: ‘Les autres s’élevaient isolées sur le rivage ou sur quelque coteau lointain.’ (Others arose isolated on the bank or on some distant hill.) While some coves, the very embodiment of natural geographic formation, remain wild (‘sauvages’), others, basins for boats, serve a social, even commercial purpose (‘indiquant l’existence d’une certaine activité commerciale’). Thus, while this vast painting (‘vaste tableau’) may end with a visual comparison of the Saint Lawrence to two contrasting natural phenomena – ‘l’effet d’une vaste mer … l’apparence d’un lac ou d’un golfe profond’ (the effect of a vast sea … the appearance of a lake or a deep gulf) – it is primarily an amalgam of the natural and the cultural, joined together in perfect harmony, the only tensions, perhaps, resulting from the contrasting desires of the two brothers and the conflicting interests of the Guérin and Wagnaër families. Paragraph nine brings this immense description, a clear tour de force, to a close: ‘Un ciel d’un bleu pâle, surtout à l’horizon, caché en plusieurs endroits par quelques-uns de ces nuages bruns et blancs, lourds

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et épais qui sont particuliers à notre climat, complétait ce tableau qu’on n’embrassait pas d’un seul coup d’œil, mais qu’un léger mouvement de la tête faisait parcourir tel que nous venons de le peindre.’ (A sky of pale blue, especially on the horizon, hidden in several places by those thick and heavy, brown and white clouds that are so particular to our climate, completed this painting, which couldn’t be grasped at a single view, but which a slight movement of the head could scan as we have just painted it.) Chauveau ends the scene by again referring to his description as a canvas (‘tableau’) that he has just painted (‘que nous venons de peindre’), and it is indeed worthy of his friend Joseph Légaré, whom Chauveau praises in a lengthy footnote: ‘M. Légaré, qui a un mérite reconnu comme paysagiste, s’est formé lui-même et sans maître: c’est un artiste indigène dans toute l’acceptance du mot.’ (368; M Légaré, who has received recognition as a landscape artist, formed himself, without a teacher: he’s a native artist in every sense of the word.) Along with the undeniable painterly qualities of the description, however, the narrator notes that there are several clouds gathering on the horizon (‘quelques-uns de ces nuages bruns et blancs, lourds et épais’) and adds that, unlike a painting, his landscape could not be grasped from a single perspective; in effect, the novel itself will require several shifts in perspective to dissipate the clouds that dot the blue horizon. Charles and Pierre both leave for Quebec City to seek employment, and the first change in perspective is marked by a change in voice in the form of a letter from Pierre announcing he is leaving Canada since ‘le commerce anglais nous exclut de ses comptoirs, et nous nous fermons la seule porte qui nous reste ouverte, une honnête et intelligente industrie’ (70; English business excludes us from its counters, and we ourselves have closed the only door remaining open to us: honest, intelligent industry). While reading the letter during a violent storm, Charles, at home for a few days, his mother, and his sister Louise hear a frightening sound announcing the destruction of the family elm (74), accompanied by a second detonation caused by a shipwreck (which Charles presumes to be Pierre’s ship), both suggesting the precarious nature of human institutions, like the family itself, and ventures, like travel, when pitted against the force of nature. Moreover, these twin omens, each reinforced by the landscape description, foresee the disintegration of a family already weakened by the absence of the father and reflect, perhaps, the precarious situation of the French-Canadian nation. The narrator next presents a law student in a cluttered room in Quebec, and by virtue of the surrounding objects alone, like so many

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signs for the trained decipherer, the narrator hopes that ‘nos lecteurs n’ont pas manqué de deviner que c’était notre héros’ (77; our readers haven’t failed to guess that it’s our hero). Charles is soon joined by two friends, Jean Guilbault, a patriotic medical student, and Henri Voisin, a young lawyer and partisan of anglicization, and the three debate the future of Canada in a chapter dominated by dialogue, yet another form of verbal presentation. If Pierre’s escapism, Jean’s determination, and Henri’s corruption are responses to the present condition of educated French Canadians (see Lemire, 17), then so is Charles’s ennui, which his patron Dumont tries to cure by sending him to stay at his wealthy brother-in-law’s farm near Montreal, which begins part two of the novel. When Charles saves the farmer’s daughter, Marie Lebrun (called Marichette), from a near disastrous fall into an abyss on a snowy night, another reminder of the perils of the wilderness, they don’t fail to fall in love and vow to marry. As Charles, still a minor, prepares to ask his mother for permission to marry, he gazes over the same landscape that began the novel, although here from a viewpoint along the shore of the cove (170). Despite the slight shift in perspective, the beautiful landscape (‘l’admirable paysage’) remains essentially the same due to the familiar landmarks: the mountains in the distance, the island in the middle, framed by the two points of land on each side of the cove, between which Charles is now situated. The only changes are ones of lighting, brought on by the time of day (dawn) and the season (spring), which Chauveau records in some detail and, as usual, in terms of contrasts: ‘Une neige éblouissante tranchant avec l’azur du firmament … De larges taches blanches … contrastaient avec les noirs sapins et l’herbe nouvelle.’ (Dazzling snow standing out against the azure heavens … large white spots … contrasted with the black firs and new grass.) The overall scene is one of perfect harmony in nature (underscored by the use of personification), which seems to bode well for Charles’s projects. What is most remarkable is that the narrator openly uses the description to structure his long and complex story by invoking the reader’s memory – ‘ce qui nous fait souvenir’ (which makes us remember) – just as he does the character’s memory: ‘rappeler en foule’ (remember in masses). Among the objects in the scene, only the fallen elm represents a change, but since the tree stands for the family itself, the change in Charles’s role is substantial, as is the addition of a new element to the landscape several pages later. As Charles’s attention is drawn to a spectacle at the Wagnaër’s home, the painting becomes ‘un tableau de genre des plus charmants, encadré

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dans le plus magnifique paysage et éclairé par les plus beaux rayons d’un soleil de printemps. Mais si quelque chose contribuait surtout à embellir ce spectacle, à coup sûr, c’était la personne de Clorinde.’ (172– 3; a most charming genre painting, framed in the most magnificent landscape and lit by the most beautiful rays of a spring sun. But if something contributed especially to embellishing this spectacle, it was, for certain, the figure of Clorinde.) Endowed with a leading role in a particularly poignant landscape, Clorinde Wagnaër captures the wavering heart of the impressionable Charles, who, surprised by his mother’s desire to emancipate him and put him in charge of the family fortune, neglects to speak to her about Marichette and begins to pursue Clorinde, whose father entices Charles into rendering him a ‘small favour’ by endorsing a bank note. As part three begins we have access to yet another voice and perspective through the diary and poetry of Marichette, who more and more suspects that Charles has forgotten her, which is confirmed by a letter from one of her friends and by various scenes in Quebec City, where Charles continues to see Clorinde. But, thanks to his usual inaction, Charles (a kindred spirit of Frédérick Moreau in Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale) fails to heed Clorinde’s warnings and speak to her father about their future. In the fifth chapter, entitled, significantly, like Lacombe’s novel, La terre paternelle (the paternal land), we have yet another description of the family property, this time in the form of a legal description (230–1) as the land is being put up for sale due to a series of machinations guided by M Wagnaër, assisted by Henri Voisin, who himself has pretensions for the hand of Clorinde and the fortune it entails. Indeed, their scheme is confirmed by Jean Guilbault, who has learned of it through a patient but who arrives too late to warn Charles. Thus, as in La terre paternelle, the father’s land is lost, due in part to his absence (or abdication) and even more to the ineptitude of the son. Clorinde continues to love Charles, but tells him that she cannot marry against her father’s wishes due to a vow made to her dying mother. Part four begins with a quote attributed to Chateaubriand’s Atala, which the narrator then uses to talk about the tragedy that has befallen the Guérin family, who must now leave their land and reside in the city. The impact of the departure is underscored by yet another description of the same landscape seen through the eyes of Charles from the same elevated perspective as in the initial scene: Deux jours dans sa vie, et ces deux jours-là seulement, le jeune homme

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avait trouvé un charme aussi grand à ce spectacle. C’était le dernier soir des dernières vacances qu’il avait passées à la maison paternelle, et le matin du premier jour de mai où il avait vu Clorinde pour la première fois. Ces deux jours lui revinrent naturellement à la mémoire. Les émotions qui laissent une trace profonde dans notre âme y gravent de vivaces souvenirs du monde extérieur pris sur le fait. De même que le soleil dans sa plus grande ardeur frappe plus nettement sur la plaque daguerrienne les objets dont on veut conserver l’image, de même il y a une lumière intérieure qui brille plus vivement en nous aux jours mémorables de notre vie, pour y buriner plus fortement le grand tableau de la nature. [272–3; Two days in his life, and only those two days, had the young man found such charm in this spectacle. This was the last evening of the last vacation he had spent in the paternal home, and the morning of the first day in May when he had seen Clorinde for the first time. These two days came back naturally to his memory. The emotions that leave a profound trace in our soul engrave within it vivid memories of the outside world as it was. Just as the sun at its strongest strikes most clearly the objects on a daguerrian plate those images we want to conserve, so too does an interior light shine most brightly inside us on the memorable days of our lives to etch more strongly within us the great image of nature.]

Again the constant elements of the landscape, bathed in sunlight, serve to anchor its composition and to remind the reader of its earlier appearances, although the narrator further does so overtly by activating Charles’s memory in explicit detail, followed by a lengthy disquisition on the mechanism of memory, one of the many such passages involving the process of remembering in French-Canadian literature. The narrator’s discussion of memory is all the more striking as it is rendered in the present tense and contains a sustained visual metaphor, in which memory is likened to a photographic plate inscribed by the force of sunlight, just as the emotions of the past events have burned an image of the landscape into memory. What is remarkable here is that it is not the events and emotions that are burned into memory, but the landscape itself: ‘y gravent de vivaces souvenirs du monde extérieur … y buriner plus fortement le grand tableau de la nature.’ Unlike the typical French Romantic reaction, which uses nature to evoke the emotion and the event in order to draw consolation, here Charles uses the memories to draw consolation from nature itself, which explains why, despite the disappointments of losing his property and his love, he is able to again find ‘un charme aussi grand à ce spectacle.’ We are clearly in the realm of French-Canadian

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Romanticism, where nature cleanses and surpasses human foibles, not just reflects and intensifies them. This familiar (and formerly familial) landscape appears for a final time several pages later as the family, on board the vessel that will take them to Quebec, waits for the tide to rise. Here, appropriately, the viewpoint is reversed, as is their fortune, and pluralized, as they all view the property and surrounding landscape collectively from below: ‘Seulement chacun de son côté regardait à terre et jetait un dernier coup d’œil sur les objets qui l’intéressaient le plus … Charles crut voir une pâle figure de jeune fille s’approcher d’une fenêtre entrouverte chez M. Wagnaër, mais cette vision fut tellement fugitive, qu’il ne sut pas trop s’il devait y croire.’ (274–5; But each of them on his or her side was looking ashore and cast a final gaze on the objects of greatest interest … Charles thought he saw the pale visage of a young lady approach the half-open window at M Wagnaër’s, but this vision was so fleeting that he didn’t know whether he should trust it.) Whereas the lengthy evocation of memories by various aspects of the landscape (not quoted here) is typical of the Romantic period, the presentation of the landscape itself is decidedly modern: Chauveau’s use of the same scene as a structuring device, the reversal of perspectives, the multiple viewpoints reinforced by the use of free indirect discourse, the visuality itself underscored by the scanning of the landscape from one place to another, and the visual confusion of Charles at the end, all these are ways of seeing and representing the landscape that would not become current in France until the novels of Zola and Proust and the paintings of Monet and Cézanne in the late-nineteenth century. As Charles, Louise, and their mother leave their former home and travel upriver towards Quebec, it is the new landscape, described over several paragraphs (276–7), that heals their memories and restores their faith in the future. This landscape description takes on particular significance, not only as the first not linked to the family home but especially as a key to reading the novel’s outcome. In the first paragraph the scene is described almost entirely in terms of natural phenomena (the sky, the sun, the water, the land, and the light), and indeed it has a positive impact, not on the characters’ cultivated faculties – ‘la raison’ (reason) – but on their natural ones: ‘la première impression faite sur leurs sens’ (the initial impression made on their senses). In the second paragraph, the landscape is seen, rather, as a combination of natural and cultural phenomena, as some islands, covered in virgin forests, are juxtaposed with others that are cultivated and inhabited, and as certain signs of (agri)culture are superimposed onto nature in its rawest form:

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‘sur les hautes montagnes du Nord, malgré leur mine sévère et sauvage, des preuves évidentes de culture’ (on the high mountains of the North, despite their harsh and wild appearance, obvious traces of cultivation). In the final paragraph, contrary to the first, it is culture that dominates, as lines of villages are compared to a long street or long strings of white pearls placed symmetrically at equal distances. But as contrasting as these two views of the landscape are, nature on the one hand, culture on the other, they are not conflicting but complementary, as is suggested in the final paragraph by visual effects of colouring and distance that unite the two: ‘Les champs et les montagnes prenaient cette couleur bleue qu’affecte toujours la partie la plus éloignée du paysage.’ (The fields and the mountains took on that blue colouring that always affects the most distant part of the landscape.) Whether by juxtaposition, superimposition, or common qualities, the landscape presents a harmonious hybrid of nature and culture. Surprisingly, in a work often termed a ‘rural novel,’ this same mixture can be seen in descriptions of the city. In order to take in a river view of their new home, Charles and Louise decide to spend the night on deck, and as they pass by the île d’Orléans and arrive at the Pointe-de-Lévy (now Pointe-Lévis), which they perceive as a site of memory (‘cette longue pointe qui porte le nom de l’immortel vainqueur de la bataille de Sainte-Foye’), they assume a perspective much like that of the first explorers (chapter one), but view a city now steeped in its own history and ‘civilized’: Québec, qui de fait est peut-être une des villes les plus mal bâties de l’Amérique, qui n’a pas un seul édifice complet et régulier, qui n’a pas un seul monument où les règles de l’architecture n’aient été plus ou moins maltraitées, Québec produit cependant, même en plein jour, une illusion étrange sur le spectateur du fleuve. La disposition, et mieux, si nous pouvons ainsi nous exprimer, les artifices du terrain font que l’objet le plus insignifiant prend une attitude pleine d’importance, si bien que l’on croit avoir devant soi une ville monumentale, telle que Rome, Naples ou Constantinople. Mais la nuit au clair de la lune, c’est bien plus encore. C’est une éblouissante imposture, un mirage phénoménal. La moindre flèche vous fait rêver de la cathédrale d’Anvers, le moindre dôme vous tranche du Saint-Pierre de Rome … Tout cela s’étage en amphithéâtre et se perd dans les derniers plans, de manière à faire supposer dix fois plus qu’il n’y a. La nature imposante et gracieuse à la fois, a suppléé aux défauts de l’art et a répandu sa solennité et sa magie sur les œuvres de

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According to the narrator, responding perhaps to critics from Europe and even Montreal (see Chauveau’s note, 367), while Quebec cannot be considered beautiful from a strictly cultural standpoint, since its buildings and monuments seem incomplete and incompatible with the rules and regularities of classical architecture, it can nonetheless compete with the most splendid cities of Europe due to the landscape itself (‘les artifices du terrain’), which is structured in tiers like an amphitheatre. The narrator’s categorical conclusion that nature has compensated for the defects of art bears a significant lesson about landscape representation in the New World, just as nature’s ability to spread its magic over the most petty human endeavours constitutes a strong suggestion concerning the inevitable defeat of inhuman actions such as those of

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Wagnaër and Voisin. It is only when the feeble lights of culture are in concert with the powerful illuminations of nature to form ‘un mélange de lueurs douteuses et indéfinies qui donnait à la scène quelque chose de féerique’ that the scene becomes monumental. The city then, like the countryside, must be seen as a mixture of nature and culture, and as such is not ‘ville’-ified by Chauveau as it was by Lacombe. If Madame Guérin succumbs to cholera in the city, the first fatal blows to her health were dealt by the scoundrels in the countryside; if Clorinde enters a convent in the city, it is because of her lost love in the countryside, confirmed by her taking the name of ‘sœur SaintCharles’; if Dumont’s fear of cholera causes him to die of a stroke, his fortune, amassed in the city, reunites Charles, now an ideal worker and student in the city, with Marichette in the countryside, where they are joined by Guilbault (city), who has married Louise (country), and the prodigal Pierre, who has returned to Quebec as a priest. Indeed, in a lengthy footnote published with the novel, Chauveau lavishes praise on both Quebec and Montreal respectively as centres of North American art and architecture: that is, culture (368).10 Nonetheless, in a short epilogue entitled ‘La nouvelle paroisse,’ Chauveau locates his newly married couples and their families in the countryside, not on the cultivated land of Marichette’s father near Montreal, but in an adjoining, unnamed, and unsettled township, where Charles has inherited land and where they create an agriculturebased colony. Clearly Chauveau, himself a deputy for Quebec county when the novel appeared in book form, is making a patriotic political statement based on the explosion in the French-Canadian population (the subject of an even more lengthy footnote, 354–60), which has created a need for expansion and colonization, not emigration or assimilation, in order to maintain cultural identity and sovereignty. Through vision, determination, and the struggle to clear the land – ‘le défricheur canadien est un peu comme le soldat anglais’ (347; the Canadian landclearer is somewhat like the English soldier) – the colony, nicknamed ‘la terre promise’ (346; promised land),11 prospers and becomes a new parish with its own church and school. After a brief participation in the 1837 Rebellion, Guilbault recognizes his error, ‘la folie de cette expédition’ (350), and seeks more practical outlets for his patriotism in agriculture itself. As for Charles, he has built a mill, and ‘Il habite un cottage qui n’est point sans prétentions. C’est une maison blanche suspendue à mi-côte dans une anse que forme la rivière; elle est entourée d’arbres et d’une luxuriante végétation qui contraste

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agréablement avec l’aspect sauvage de la chute.’ (350; He lives in a cottage that is not without pretensions. It’s a white house suspended halfway up a hill, overlooking a cove formed by the river; it is surrounded by trees and luxurious vegetation that contrasts pleasantly with the wild aspect of the waterfall.) In short, he has not returned to the terre paternelle, he has replicated it in his own right, including its view looking over a cove and its most essential features, the complementary contrast of culture (‘une maison blanche’) and nature (‘l’aspect sauvage de la chute’). Moreover, Chauveau clearly makes a broader statement about French-Canadian identity by detaching it from the family, la terre paternelle, and displacing it onto la patrie, a mixture of land (‘le sol’), to be sure, necessarily invested with culture, as he states in another footnote: ‘Les Canadiens français se sont attachés à leur religion, à leur langue, à leurs institutions, à proportion des efforts que l’on a faits pour leur arracher toutes ces choses qui beaucoup plus que le sol forment la patrie.’ (359; French Canadians became attached to their religion, their language, their institutions in proportion to the efforts made to rip from them all those things that, much more than the land, form the fatherland.) But, in the final paragraphs, it appears that Charles, rather than remain a simple farmer, will, like Chauveau, run for parliament, a fate the narrator pretends to bemoan (352). Charles Guérin is, then, a complex, even ambivalent, and thus eminently modern novel. The landscape, like the plot, brings forth a nexus of elements seen from a variety of perspectives, without clear cause or solution. If, as Pierre contends, English commerce has excluded French Canadians, he adds that the latter have shut the only remaining door: industry (70). Charles opens such a door in the final pages of the novel, with an industry based on moral values rather than exclusively on market values, unlike the commercial interests of the foreigner Wagnaër, now ‘gone to the dogs’ (343), and his French-Canadian accomplice, ironically named Voisin (neighbour).12 But if the merciless mercantilism imputed primarily to the English is condemned, it is not confined to the city, which stands along with the countryside as an amalgam of nature and culture and thus an emblem of French-Canadian identity. In his conclusion to an enlightening article on Charles Guérin and nineteenth-century fiction, Jean-Pierre Duquette provides an overview both of the novel and of its historical context: Au milieu du XIXe siècle, un jeune écrivain disait enfin, par le biais d’une fiction romanesque transparente, quelques-unes des conséquences les

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plus lourdes et les plus dramatiques de la Conquête: cul-de-sac des professions classiques déjà encombrées; paralysie du dynamisme et des énergies vitales; exploitation systématique des ressources importantes aux mains des seuls Anglais. L’avenir et les possibilités de développement normal de toute une nation anéantis pour presque un siècle encore. Si l’on y réfléchit, la seule voie possible était celle que trace Charles Guérin: l’enracinement dans le sol national, qui sera l’essentiel de tout le prêche patriotique jusqu’à l’entre-deux-guerres. [In the mid-nineteenth century, a young writer finally stated, through the bias of transparent novelistic fiction, some of the most weighty and dramatic consequences of the Conquest: a dead end in the already encumbered classic professions; paralysis of dynamism and vital energies; systematic exploitation of major resources solely in the hands of the English. The future and possibilities for normal development of an entire nation wiped out for nearly yet another century later. If one reflects, the only possible path was that taken by Charles Guérin: entrenchment in the national soil, which will be the thrust of all patriotic preaching up to the interwar period.]13

Moreover, our analysis of the various landscape descriptions in the novel has led us to conclude that, in Charles Guérin, the notion of land (‘le sol national’) is not confined to cultivated fields, but also extends to nature as well as to the city. Such a complex conflation also appears in the paintings of Cornelius Krieghoff. Country and City in Painting: Krieghoff The Pointe-Lévis, seen and revered by the Guérin family in its voyage to Quebec City (278), is not only a site of memory, but a site of beauty frequently chosen by painters for a panoramic view of Quebec. Such is the case with Krieghoff’s Québec vu de la pointe de Lévy of 1853 (plate 4). Constructed in parallel horizontal bands, the painting offsets them with the strong vertical lines of the trees and tends to juxtapose alternating light and dark zones and reds and greens rather than seek a tonal harmony. The natural setting in the foreground, framed by trees on each side and tending towards the wild, as suggested by the numerous trees and rocks, is described by Didier Prioul and Paul Bourassa as ‘animé par le traitement dynamique du premier plan où l’artiste emploie un jeu assez souple de diagonales croisées’ (556; enlivened by the dynamic treatment of the foreground where the artist uses a quite subtle play of crossing diagonals). While Dennis Reid sees the human figures primarily

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as ‘“staffage,” or small figures to set scale’ (Krieghoff, 72), the garb of the habitant on the right and the woodsman on the left adds a dimension of cultural identity and possessiveness to this painting, not necessarily as the landowners, but in a spiritual sense of sovereignty as would an Amerindian in a wilderness scene or, conversely, a pair of British soldiers. The farmland here is complemented by the river with an emphasis on shipping, a mercantile accent that betrays, perhaps, Krieghoff’s European upbringing and commercial aspirations. Moreover, the vantage point brings the city into the centre of the composition, where it assumes a nearly geometrical shape. The brilliant lighting brings forth such detail as to make any number of landmarks not only visible but recognizable, from the Tour Martello and the citadel to the left, to the Parliament building and the towers of the Quebec cathedral to the right, with the obelisk of the Wolfe-Montcalm monument and the steeples of the Chalmers-Wesley Church in the middle (see Prioul and Bourrassa, 556). Highlighting the city also causes the countryside and mountains behind it to recede in depth and visual importance. One might say that this painting is ‘Romantic’ in its direct juxtaposition of nature and culture, mediated by agriculture yet ‘urban’ in its emphasis on the city and its commerce. Quite sensitive perhaps to his buyer’s market, Krieghoff constructs an image (actually two, since another, now in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, is nearly identical to this one in the Musée du Québec) that highlights familiar aspects of the city, but that nonetheless also functions as a reminder of the French-Canadian natural and national heritage. In its favourable treatment of the city in relation to agricultural land and nature, Krieghoff’s painting mirrors the complexity of Chauveau’s novel. Paradise Lost or Regained? It would seem that, in their ambivalence, all of the works examined in this chapter – verbal and visual – exceed the strict limits of the ‘ruralist’ position, as defined by Vanasse: The forest kills … The city diminishes existence (18). La terre paternelle aligns agriculture and nature, while Charles Guérin allies the country and the city within their natural surroundings. The paintings of Légaré and Krieghoff are clearly based on similar combinations, true to the complexities, some might say contradictions, inherent in the French-Canadian identity. But how should we read, at least in the novels, the central role played by the loss of the father’s land (la terre paternelle)? Can it be seen as a parable (based on inclusion) of the loss of the fatherland (la patrie)? In

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this case, is the ‘fatherland’ meant to be France or New France? Or, should we read it as a symbol (by extension) for the loss of father figures? In this case, does it mean the forefathers of the French colonial period, such as those depicted in novels like Philippe Aubert de Gaspé père’s Les anciens Canadiens?14 If so, why are such father figures absent or do they abdicate? Is this a further reflection of their disappearance after the Conquest or of the ‘failures’ of the patriot leaders during the rebellions of 1837–8? Such would be the conclusion reached by Ouellet, Beaulieu, and Tremblay: ‘Sans doute la “Conquête” de 1763 et la défaite des “Patriotes” de 1837 ont-elles contribué à cette transformation de l’image paternelle puisque les Canadiens français conquis, colonisés, appelés à jouer un rôle subalterne dans leur propre histoire, pouvaient difficilement continuer d’apparaître comme les héros fiers et libres d’autrefois, comme des modèles aux yeux de leurs enfants.’ (78–9; The ‘Conquest’ of 1763 and the defeat of the ‘Patriots’ in 1837 no doubt contributed to this transformation of the paternal image since the French Canadians, conquered, colonized, and called upon to play a subordinate role in their own history, could hardly continue to appear as the proud, free heroes of the past, as models in the eyes of their children.) If, however, one sees the national dilemma as a family drama, should we not, rather, focus precisely on these ‘children,’ those main characters who react to the loss of the father’s land? In La terre paternelle, the land is regained through the efforts of the prodigal son Charles, who had the courage to break family ties – ‘l’idée d’être enfin affranchi de l’autorité paternelle et de jouir en maître de sa pleine liberté’ (35; the idea of finally being free from paternal authority and enjoying being master of his own freedom) – and renew himself through contact with his more natural self in the northern wilderness. Similarly, Charles Guérin can be read in its simplest form according to Duquette’s summary: ‘Dépossédé de son patrimoine par l’usurpateur étranger, le héros du roman se refait un destin en travaillant à la réédification nationale; il recommence la première colonisation en mettant sur pied une micro-société à vocation d’abord agricole et patriarchale. La revanche symbolique sur le conquérant s’opère à plusieurs niveaux.’ (184; Dispossessed of his patrimony by the foreign usurper, the novel’s hero recreates his destiny by working towards national reconstruction; he replicates the first colonization by setting up a micro-society that is primarily agricultural and patriarchal. The symbolic revenge on the conqueror operates on several levels.) Indeed, do we not witness, in these national sagas, the normal course of the family drama, in which the son goes beyond the limits of

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the father to forge his own future? Moving back to the national level, can we not draw a lesson of advancement rather than retrenchment for the French-Canadian people: an identity forged as well as inherited? Is the real (or at least an alternative) message of these early novels less the defeat of the father than the ultimate victory of subsequent generations? Are the seeds of future resistance already ‘planted’ in the collective unconscious and perceptible in the landscape if not always the plot? Such questions provide an apt transition towards the next chapter, since both Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard and Laure Conan’s Angéline de Montbrun will see the protagonist’s future preceded by the death of the father.

Chapter Four

New Horizons in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Lower Canada, which became Eastern Canada in 1840 (Act of Union) and then the Province of Quebec in 1867 (Confederation), witnessed a rural expansion beyond the fertile but overpopulated and agriculturally subdivided Saint Lawrence valley into other areas of Quebec, where the underdeveloped land required a struggle against nature, recalling that of the early pioneer heroes of the French colonial period. Indeed, the term ‘colonisation’ is often applied to this national and nationalistic effort to clear the wilderness north and east of the urban centres of Quebec and Montreal and turn it into agricultural land, a project promoted in 1848 by the governor general Lord Elgin and promulgated by the Catholic Church.1 In the novel of this period, the struggle for family identity explored in the previous chapter takes on the additional dimensions of a consciously articulated movement towards national identity in the Jean Rivard novels of Antoine Gérin-Lajoie coupled with a quest for personal and spiritual identity in Laure Conan’s Angéline de Montbrun. Although a seemingly unlikely pairing of novels, both of the titular heroes determine their destiny in the wake of their fathers’ deaths, and in both novels the land and the landscape continue to embody their identitary struggle as well as its outcome, by expanding and reconfiguring horizons, in one case beyond the Saint Lawrence valley, in the other beyond the real towards the ideal. Culture versus Nature in Jean Rivard The agricultural utopia sketched into the epilogue of Chauveau’s Charles Guérin is developed later in the century in two novels by Antoine

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Gérin-Lajoie, Jean Rivard, le défricheur (1862) and its sequel Jean Rivard, économiste (1864).2 Although neither novel is particularly visual, the land is constantly present and the few landscape descriptions are highly revealing of an ideological evolution taking place within the novels and, perhaps, within the French-Canadian mentality. After a brief ‘avant-propos’ in which the narrator proclaims his text to be a true story, not a ‘novel,’ Jean Rivard, le défricheur begins with the unexpected and untimely death of the protagonist’s father, which leaves the talented youth of nineteen stranded, without professional prospects (18). Forced to abandon the family land and fend for himself in a world no longer suited to his education, it is difficult not to see in his plight not only a trace of the eviction from Paradise, a mythological dimension ever-present in French-Canadian lore and literature,3 but also, a parallel to (if not a parable for) the fall of New France and its replication in the failed patriots’ rebellions, both of which left its ‘sons’ psychologically disconsolate, economically destitute, and culturally displaced.4 Jean Rivard’s plight is defined explicitly as a national phenomenon, and when the parish priest points him towards agriculture, ‘la mère de la prospérité nationale’ (27; the mother of national prosperity), he is merely reiterating a nationalistic propaganda prevalent at the time, whose message Jean readily espouses. The population explosion in the Saint Lawrence valley, however, pushes him to emigrate towards ‘les Cantons de l’Est,’ whose natural beauty is extolled by the nonetoo-silent narrator: ‘Partout la nature s’y montre, sinon aussi sublime, aussi grandiose, du moins presque aussi pittoresque que dans le bas du fleuve et les environs de Québec. Montagnes, collines, vallées, lacs, rivières, tout semble fait pour charmer les regards.’ (32–3; Nature reveals itself throughout, if not as sublime and grandiose, at least as picturesque as in the lower river and surroundings of Quebec. Mountains, hills, valleys, lakes, rivers, everything seems made for enchanting the eye.) But, as the title suggests, Jean Rivard must not only ‘défricher’ the land, that is, transform it, in order to guarantee its future productivity, but also ‘déchiffrer’ its natural signs in order to assess its potential, just as his mentor M Lacasse can determine ‘d’après l’expérience qu’il avait acquise durant sa longue carrière, à quels signes on pouvait juger de la bonne ou mauvaise qualité du sol’ (38–9; from the experience he had acquired during his long career by what signs one could assess the good or bad quality of the soil). This double role of déchiffreur / défricheur in the name of culture entails a constant struggle against nature, which Gérin-Lajoie consistently conveys

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by military metaphors, both repeated and developed, as when the narrator attributes to Jean Rivard ‘cette bravoure militaire, cette valeur fougueuse qui se manifeste de temps à autre en présence de l’ennemi, sur un champ de bataille’ (53; that military bravery, that fiery temperament that arises from time to time in the presence of the enemy on the battle field). The omnipresent military metaphor becomes all the more prevalent after he and his hired hand read a Histoire populaire de Napoléon and begin to  see the forest as a battleground: ‘Cet ennemi, c’était la forêt qui les entourait et à travers laquelle les deux vaillants guerriers devaient se frayer un passage. Les travaux de nos défricheurs n’étaient plus autre chose que des batailles sanglantes.’ (70; The enemy was the forest surrounding them, through which the two valiant warriers had to forge a passage. Their work in clearing the land was nothing other than bloody battles.) In effect, their perception of nature has been transformed by culture (French at that) by means of a book and in the form of a social institution (the army), whose organization they then impose on the wilderness. Again it is difficult not to read into this extended metaphor remnants of the Conquest and repressed rebellions, a re-enactment and reversal of past military misfortunes in which the French Canadian now emerges as the ultimate conqueror of the land.5 Their victory may be read as compensation for paternal property, fatherland, and paradise lost, but now, through their efforts, regained, as foreseen in Rivard’s founding dream (the ultimate expression of repressed and disguised desire): ‘Il s’endormit profondément, et eut un songe assez étrange. Il se crut transporté au milieu d’une immense forêt. Tout à coup des hommes apparurent armés de haches, et les arbres tombèrent çà et là sous les coups de la cognée. Bientôt ces arbres furent remplacés par des moissons luxuriantes; puis des vergers, des jardins, des fleurs surgirent comme par enchantement. Le soleil brillait dans tout son éclat; il se crut au milieu du paradis terrestre. En même temps il lui sembla entendre une voix lui dire: il ne dépend que de toi d’être un jour l’heureux et paisible possesseur de ce domaine.’ [31; He fell fast asleep, and had a dream that was quite strange. He found himself transported to the middle of a vast forest. Suddenly men armed with axes appeared, and the trees fell here and there under their blows. Soon those trees were replaced by rich harvests; then orchards, gardens, flowers surged forth as if by magic. The sun was shining in full brightness, he believed himself in the middle of earthly paradise. At the same time, he seemed to hear a voice tell him: it depends on you alone to one day be the happy, peaceful owner of this domain.]

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This ‘domain’ is not only Jean Rivard’s personal property, it is, by extension, Quebec; the voice is not only that of his conscience, but that of the nation, which will resound again in Maria Chapdelaine and Menaud, maître-draveur (chapter six).6 Despite this natural enmity and struggle to the death, however, the wilderness remains sublime for the narrator, ‘Les grands arbres de la forêt offrent aux regards quelque chose de sublime. Rien ne présente une plus belle image de la fierté, de la dignité royale’ (57; The huge trees in the forest offered something sublime to the eye. Nothing displays a more beautiful image of pride, of royal dignity), and Jean, in particular, remains ‘naturally sensitive’ to the beauty of the natural landscape: ‘naturellement sensible aux beautés de la nature’ (60). While the characters revel in the the grandeur and beauty of nature, however, the narrator is generally unable to paint it, except in the most general and plural of terms, even regretting the absence of a painter or poet, themselves also incapable of capturing certain spectacles, such as that produced by burning logs: ‘Ils eurent une fois, entre autres, par une nuit fort noire, un de ces spectacles d’une beauté vraiment saisissante, et qui aurait mérité d’exercer le pinceau d’un artiste ou la verve d’un poète, quoique l’un et l’autre eussent certainement été impuissants à reproduire cette scène grandiose dans toute sa splendeur.’ (102; One time especially they had a spectacle of really striking beauty, which would have warranted the work of an artist’s brush or a poet’s verve, although both would certainly have been powerless to reproduce this grandiose scene in all its splendour.) In effect, the painter and the poet, as products and proponents of culture, are unable to capture the newness and nuances of nature, albeit a nature already on its way towards culture. In fact, despite a sprinkling of praise for ‘the sublime beauties of nature’ (113), the most visual landscape ‘painting’ undertaken by Gérin-Lajoie involves a highly cultured scene, as Jean Rivard returns momentarily to his home village: Au moment où Jean Rivard débarquait sur la rive nord, le soleil pouvait avoir un quart d’heure de haut; ses rayons inondaient la plaine et se reflétaient de tous côtés sur les clochers et sur les toits de fer-blanc. Il voyait à sa droite l’église de Grandpré, et à sa gauche celle de la paroisse voisine, toutes deux s’élevant majestueusement dans la vallée, et dominant les habitations; elles apparaissaient comme enveloppées dans un nuage d’encens. Les longues suites de maisons, assises l’une à côté de l’autre, quelquefois à double ou à triple rang, et remplissant les trois lieues qui séparaient les deux clochers, se déroulaient à ses regards. Quoique à une assez grande

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distance il pouvait distinguer parfaitement la maison de sa mère, avec le hangar, le fournil, la grange et les autres bâtiments de la ferme nouvellement blanchis à la chaux, ainsi que la maison de brique voisine, celle du père François Routier, et les arbres du jardin. Ce spectacle, intéressant même pour un étranger, était ravissant pour Jean Rivard. Il lui passa comme un frisson de joie par tout le corps, il sentit son cœur se dilater de bonheur, et partit à travers champs, fossés et clôtures pour se rendre à la maison paternelle. Il était léger comme l’air et semblait voler plutôt que marcher. [155; At the moment that Jean Rivard debarked on the north shore, the sun must have been a quarter of an hour up; its rays flooded the plain and reflected all over on the steeples and tin roofs. On his right he saw the Grandpré church and on his left that of the neighbouring parish, both rising majestically in the valley and, dominating the dwellings; they seemed enveloped in a cloud of incense. The long succession of houses, sitting side by side, sometimes in double or triple rows, filling up the three leagues between the two steeples, unfurled before his eyes. Although quite far away, he could distinguish perfectly his mother’s house, with its shed, bakehouse, barn, and other out buildings, all recently whitewashed, as well as the neighbouring brick house, belonging to François Routier, and the trees in its garden. This spectacle, interesting even to a stranger, was delightful for Jean Rivard. Something like a shiver of joy passed through his entire body, he felt his heart swell with happiness, and he made his way through open fields, ditches, and enclosures to get to the paternal home. He was as light as air and seemed to fly more than walk.]

This painterly passage begins with a specific perspective (‘sur la rive nord’) and continues with repeated allusions to the character’s viewpoint and vision (‘il voyait,’ ‘apparaissaient,’ ‘ses regards,’ ‘il pouvait distinguer,’ ‘ce spectacle’). The overall composition is framed by the two church steeples (‘à sa droite l’église de Grandpré … à sa gauche celle de la paroisse voisine’), which define the space of the painting between them (‘les trois lieues qui séparaient les deux clochers’). This space is then filled in (‘remplissant’) by effects of line (‘les longues suites de maison’), light (‘le soleil … ses rayons inondaient la plaine’), colour (‘blanchis à chaux’), and atmosphere (‘comme enveloppées dans un nuage d’encens’). One senses throughout the passage the cultural density of the area, revealed by the two parishes that run seamlessly together, by the houses set side by side and in ranks (recalling the seigneurial system of land allocation dating from the French colonial period), and by the metaphor of natural mist portrayed as religious incense. The vast description ends up by focusing on the garden (‘les arbres du

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jardin’) of Jean’s fiancée Louise Routier and the house of his ancestors (‘la maison paternelle’), two of the most culturally significant places in the Quebec landscape, and whose reconfiguration will reappear in this novel and its sequel, not to mention throughout Quebec literature and painting. As Rivard plans his future home and garden, for example: ‘À l’est et un peu en arrière se trouvait le jardin, dont les arbres encore en germe ombrageraient plus tard le toit de sa demeure. Jean Rivard, malgré ses rudes combats contre les arbres de la forêt, était loin cependant de leur garder rancune, et il n’eut rien de plus pressé que de faire planter le long du nouveau chemin, vis-à-vis sa propriété, une suite d’arbrisseaux.’ (204–5; To the east and a bit behind was the garden, whose trees, still taking root, would later provide shade for his dwelling. Jean Rivard, despite his rough battles against the forest trees, was nonetheless far from holding a grudge; he had nothing more pressing than having a row of shrubs planted along the length of the new road, opposite his property.) Despite the disclaimer, the trees he now desires are the product of culture (‘planter’) not nature, against which the battle seems to have been won. If Jean Rivard, le défricheur is, as Issenhuth maintains, ‘un roman à thèse’ (11), that thesis clearly highlights culture, in the sense of agriculture, making the novel an ‘évangile de la colonialisation’ (Beaudoin, Naissance, 162). The narrator, who goes so far as to cite Lord Elgin anachronistically,7 states in no uncertain terms – ‘Tous ceux qui parmi nous ont à cœur le bien-être du peuple et la prospérité du pays regardent avec raison la colonisation des terres incultes comme le moyen le plus direct et le plus sûr de parvenir à l’accomplissement de leurs vœux.’ (165; All those among us who hold dear the well-being of the people and the prosperity of the country rightfully see the colonization of uncultivated land as the most direct and surest means of fulfilling their wishes.) And this thesis is sustained to the detriment of its antitheses, the city (vilified repeatedly in letters from Jean’s friend Gustave Charmenil), and even nature, which dominates at the beginning, but eventually succumbs to the colonizing force of agriculture, as Jean’s farm flourishes. The protagonist’s success is not merely personal, however; it extends to the French-Canadian collectivity, and the scope of the landscape description expands accordingly: La cabane de Jean Rivard devint trop petite pour la société qui la fréquentait, car il faut dire que le canton de Bristol s’établissait avec une rapidité sans exemple dans les annales de la colonialisation. Chaque jour

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de nouveaux défricheurs faisaient leur apparition à Louiseville, considérée d’un commun accord comme le chef-lieu du canton. La rumeur de la confection prochaine d’un chemin public s’était répandue avec la rapidité de l’éclair dans toutes les anciennes paroisses du district des Trois-Rivières, et des centaines de jeunes gens, des familles entières, s’établissaient avec empressement au milieu de ces magnifiques forêts. Dans l’espace de quelques mois, la moitié des lots du canton furent vendus, quoique le prix en eût d’abord doublé, puis triplé et même quadruplé dans la partie dont l’Honorable Robert Smith était le propriétaire. Un grand nombre de familles n’attendaient que l’ouverture du chemin pour se rendre sur leurs lots.’ [174–5; Jean Rivard’s cabin became too small for the group that frequented it, because it must be said that the Bristol canton was being settled with a rapidity unprecedented in the annals of colonization. Each day new land-clearers appeared in Louiseville, commonly considered the county seat of the canton. The rumour of the impending construction of a main road was spreading like wildfire in all the old parishes of the Trois-Rivières district, and hundreds of young people, entire families, were settling zealously in the middle of these magnificent forests. Within the space of several months, half the lots in the canton were sold, although the price had first doubled, then tripled and even quadrupled in the part owned by the Honourable Robert Smith. A large number of families were awaiting only the opening of the road to get to their lots.]

Although far from visual or painterly, the description is highly revealing in terms of Gérin-Lajoie’s style as well as the ideologies it embodies. Certainly the narrator’s pretensions of documentation as well as his propensity towards hyperbole are readily apparent in the first sentence: ‘sans exemple dans les annales de la colonialisation.’ Moreover, the very sentence structure, like the structure of the novel itself, is based on the principle of inclusion and expansion, which defines the ideal relationship between the individual and the nation. The first sentence, for example, expands easily from Jean Rivard’s cabin to the group of neighbours that gather there to the entire canton of Bristol; much as Louiseville (as he baptized his property) is the central place (‘chef-lieu’) for the entire area circumscribed by the canton. One notes also that the ‘place’ (‘lieu’) is less a site of memory than a promise for the future, both personal (his upcoming marriage to Louise) and collective (‘des familles entières’); indeed, the past (‘les anciennes paroisses’) is specifically fled by the young, who eagerly await future possibilities (‘n’attendaient que l’ouverture’). On a final note, the only anglophone character in the

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novel betrays his mercantile values by increasing the price of the land, which is nonetheless purchased, and thus possessed, by the advancing throngs of French Canadians. If Jean Rivard, le défricheur announces the thesis, Jean Rivard, économiste develops it ad infinitum (some might say ad nauseam). The narrator begins the sequel with a balanced view of nature and culture, space and place: ‘Transportez-vous au centre du canton de Bristol. Voyezvous dans l’épaisseur de la forêt, cette petite éclaircie de trente à quarante acres, encore parsemée de souches noirâtres? Voyez-vous, au milieu, sur la colline, cette maisonnette blanche, à l’apparence proprette et gaie? C’est là le gîte modeste de Jean Rivard et de Louise Routier.’ (229; Take yourself to the centre of the canton of Bristol. Can you see in the thick forest that small clearing of thirty or forty acres, still sprinkled with blackish stumps? Can you see, in the middle, on the hill, that small white house so neat and gay in appearance? That’s the modest abode of Jean Rivard and Louise Routier.) It is, however, culture that prevails, and though Rivard used to relish felled trees, he now plants them as would an artist: ‘On a déjà vu que Jean Rivard aimait beaucoup les arbres; il était même à cet égard quelque peu artiste … Il mettait autant d’attention à bien tailler ses arbres, à disposer symétriquement ses plantations autour de sa maison qu’il en accordait au soin de ses animaux et aux autres détails de son exploitation.’ (232–3; We’ve already seen that Jean Rivard really liked trees; in this respect he was even a bit of an artist. He paid as much attention to pruning his trees, to arranging his plantings symmetrically around the house, as he did in caring for his animals and other details of his farm.) And if agriculture itself is an art (105), it is also a science: ‘Pour nous, cultivateurs, il faut, voyezvous savoir un peu de tout; la chimie, la météorologie, la botanique, la géologie, la minéralogie se rattachent étroitement à l’agriculture.’ (413; For us farmers, you see, we must know a bit of everything: chemistry, meteorology, botany, geology, mineralogy are all tightly linked to agriculture.) As an aspect of culture, agriculture falls under its rules (420; ‘mon système de culture’) and is perpetuated through its books (420; ‘livres sur l’agriculture’) and especially education, a main issue in this second novel. Through hard work, education, and religion, Jean’s ‘modest’ home becomes the ‘earthly paradise’ (238) foreseen in his initial dream (31), and as in its mythological ancestor, life revolves around the garden, where nature submits to the order of culture. Indeed, under Jean’s leadership, the entire community flourishes, and is itself compared by the

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narrator to a garden: ‘Toute la paroisse me sembla un immense jardin … toute la nature semblait travailler au bien-être et au plaisir de l’homme.’ (429; The entire parish looked to me like an immense garden … all of nature seemed to work for the well-being and pleasure of humanity.) One hears echoes here of similar colonies, such as those in L’Iroquoise (chapter two) and Charles Guérin (chapter three), with nature subordinated to culture, although in this case, nature seems to have disappeared, and the metaphor of the garden reinforces the importance of this cultural icon, regained, even ‘reconquered,’ in Jean Rivard. Evicted from the paternal ‘garden’ by his father’s death, Jean has managed through his own resources to reconstruct it, but, I hasten to add, not merely to replicate it. Far from a mere regression, Jean Rivard’s garden and community represent an advance beyond the past into a new future, based on principles that are clearly delineated in the second novel, ones that often clash with the those of the past. In fact, in constructing ‘une petite république’ (342; a small republic), complete with all the institutions necessary for the administration of its affairs, the development of its resources, the intellectual, social, and political progress of its population, Jean Rivard bemoans to his friend Gustave the fact that ‘des gens s’obstinent à marcher dans la route qu’ont suivie leurs pères, sans tenir compte des découvertes dans l’ordre moral, politique et social, aussi bien que dans l’ordre industriel et scientifique’ (342; some people obstinately follow their father’s footsteps, without considering new discoveries of a moral, social, and political order, as well as the industrial and scientific order) and that ‘nos pères venus de France aux dix-septième et dixhuitième siècles n’ont pas apporté avec eux la pratique ou la connaissance de ce que les Anglais appellent le self-government’ (344; our fathers who came from France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries didn’t bring with them the practice and knowledge of what the English call self-government). To put it succinctly (which is not always the case in the novel), Jean Rivard’s principles are based on the notion of equality, made possible, to be sure, by economic prosperity – agricultural and industrial – and based on universal education that advocates equality of social classes, equality of genders, and equality of races.8 We are thus, once again, as with La terre paternelle and Charles Guérin, obliged to reconsider the Jean Rivard novels as extending well beyond the rigid, conservative limits usually attributed to the ‘rural novel’ and, to some degree, as undermining those categories. In this sense, I lean towards Robert Major’s somewhat radical but highly convincing

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rereading of Jean Rivard as a North American ‘success story’ (16). In a classless society, Major argues, success is a matter of economic prosperity, and although initially a ‘défricheur’ and agricultural colonist, Jean Rivard is ultimately an economist and statesman (73). In my view as well, Jean Rivard is presented as a self-made man, with a strong sense of civic duty, whose vision of society is turned towards the future and based on economic independence and prosperity as guarantors of equality. In the scope of his vision and the extent of his success, he far exceeds the modest but detectable gains of his fellow ‘sons,’ Charles Chauvin and Charles Guérin, who have, nonetheless, also managed to rid themselves of the father’s yoke and define their own future. And once again, the Jean Rivard novels, like their literary ancestors, use landscape description, however sparse in this case, to reveal the true message. In the final pages of the second novel, the narrator introduces himself as a character, like so many predecessors, in order to authenticate his story by reliance on the oral tradition – ‘Jean Rivard me relata la plus grande partie des faits que le lecteur connaît déjà’ (395; Jean Rivard told me the greater part of the facts the reader already knows) – before assuming the viewpoint for the second novel’s only extended painterly description: Et nous montâmes sur la galerie du second étage de sa maison, d’où ma vue pouvait s’étendre au loin de tous côtés. Je vis à ma droite une longue suite d’habitations de cultivateurs, à ma gauche le riche et joli village de Rivardville, qu’on aurait pu sans arrogance décorer du nom de ville. Il se composait de plus d’une centaine de maisons éparses sur une dizaine de rues d’une régularité parfaite. Un grand nombre d’arbres plantés le long des rues et autour des habitations donnaient à la localité une apparance de fraîcheur et de gaieté … Deux édifices dominaient tout le reste: l’église, superbe bâtiment en pierre, et la maison d’école, assez spatieuse pour mériter le nom de collège ou de couvent. Les toits de fer blanc de ces vastes édifices brillaient aux rayons du soleil … Presque toutes les maisons étaient peintes en blanc et présentaient à l’œil l’image de l’aisance et de la propreté. Après avoir admiré quelques temps l’aspect du village et des campagnes environnantes, mes yeux s’arrêtèrent involontairement sur la ferme de mon hôte, et j’exprimai le désir de la visiter. [397–8; And we went up to the balcony on the second storey of his house, from where I could see afar on all sides. On my right I saw a long succession of farmers’ dwellings, on my left the wealthy, attractive village of Rivardville, which one could without arogance call a city. It was composed of a hundred homes

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scattered over some ten streets of perfect regularity. A great many trees planted along the streets and around the dwellings lent the locality a fresh and gay appearance … Two edifices dominated all the rest: the church, a superb stone building, and the school house, spacious enough to warrant the term college or convent. The tin roofs of these vast edifices glowed in the sun’s rays … Nearly all the houses were painted white and presented the eye with an image of ease and neatness. After having admired the view of the village and surrounding countryside for some time, my eyes came naturally to my host’s farm, and I expressed the desire to visit it.]

As in the description of Jean’s home village in the first novel, this one begins with the designation of viewpoint (‘la galerie du second étage’) and continues with denotations of visuality (‘ma vue,’ ‘Je vis,’ ‘présentaient à l’œil,’ ‘l’image,’ ‘mes yeux’). The vast space (‘s’étendre au loin de tous côtés’) is framed by houses on the right and the village on the left. Beauty (‘joli’) is here defined by richness (‘riche’) and regularity (‘régularité’); the trees are ‘plantés’ and even the light leads the eye to the two edifices that are the most emblematic of culture: the church and the school. The description ends when the restless eye roving over the countryside is involuntarily drawn back to the centre, the habitat, the place of culture, as was the young Rivard’s in the first passage. On second reading, however, when the two passages are seen together, significant differences appear, ones that unearth and underscore profound ideological differences in the two descriptions and thus in the two landscapes portrayed; the first landscape represents the old order (Grandpré, whose name recalls the ‘grand dérangement’9 as well as agriculture [‘pré’]), the second landscape reveals the new vision (Rivardville, named for its self-made founder and designating itself as a city [‘ville’], as the narrator points out). In the first case, Jean’s solitary viewpoint, emphasized by the third-person singular pronoun, was from below; in the second, the collective viewpoint is shared by the narrator and his hero, captured initially by the first-person plural pronoun ‘nous,’ as they dominate the scene below them. Space is more open here (‘ma vue pouvait s’étendre’), and the sparsely placed houses are arranged in perfect equality (‘une régularité parfaite’) not by ranks denoting orders of generations and classes. Unlike the first scene, framed by the two church steeples, this one is shared by the church and the school, emphasizing the importance of education and progress in addition to past traditions and rites. Indeed, the incense-like mist of the first scene has dissipated, and both buildings bathe in the brilliant sunlight of

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a new order. The cultural order of the first description is pastoral or rural, but that of the second description is utopian and thus ultimately revolutionary, according to Major: ‘l’utopie est une arme dans le conflit social … visant l’avenir de la collectivité dans une refonte totalisante’ (17; utopia is a weapon of social conflict … aiming towards the future of the community with a complete overhaul). If culture tends to dominate the second novel and even the second part of the first one, it nonetheless continues to coexist with nature due to the temporal quality of the text, which maintains both as part of a dynamic process. Unlike the city, which is explicitly and consistently discredited, nature can never be entirely discounted. Through the intervention of memory, inherent in the reading process, the initial scenes in the clearing are superimposed onto the later ones to produce a binocular image that embraces both nature and culture. Just as the ideal citizen, described at the end of the second novel, strives to maintain a balance between physical and mental faculties (416), and just as he aspires to be a well-rounded man (458), one might say that the ideal landscape also maintains a balance between the beauty of nature and the productivity of culture. In the novel, such ‘equilibrium’ (see Beaudoin, Naissance, 162) can be achieved by superimposing nature and culture temporally, just as in painting it can be achieved by juxtaposing visual elements spatially. Nature, Culture, and Agriculture in Painting: Walker and Brymner In the late nineteenth century many painters in Quebec turned to agriculture as a source of national pride and identity, chief among them Horatio Walker and William Brymner. In keeping with ‘Walker’s sense that the rural life was morally superior to urban life’ (Bermingham, 65), his Les battures de l’île aux Grues, 1885 (figure 4.1), exemplifies this rural trend in the Saint Lawrence valley, paralleled in Ontario by his friend Homer Watson: The relatively low viewpoint and unobstructed foreground bring the spectator into close contact with the scene, in which agriculture is foregrounded, literally, by the swineherd and the pigs grazing in the battures (shallows) along the shores of the île aux Grues, northeast of Quebec City. Further horizontal bands expand the composition beyond this limited subject matter. Culture, in the form of a village and boats, occupies the middle ground, while the far ground, consisting of river, mountains, and sky, takes up a full half of the painting, lending it its sense of openness, expansion, and ‘immensity in nature’ (Farr, 29).

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4.1 Horatio Walker. Les battures de l’île aux Grues, 1885. Aquarelle sur papier, 43,8 x 59,4 cm. Musée des beaux-arts du Québec, 1934.536. Photo: Patrick Altman / The Shallows of the île aux Grues, 1885. Watercolour on paper, 43.8 x 59.4 cm. Musée des beaux-arts du Québec, 1934.536. Photo: Patrick Altman.

During most of his career, Walker divided his time between New York City, where he was highly successful, and the île d’Orléans, his adoptive rural home, which served as the primary subject matter for his art, as he states: ‘The pastoral life of the people of our countryside, the noble work of the Habitant, the magnificent panoramas which surround him, the different aspects of our seasons … such are the preferred subjects of my paintings’ (in Harper, Painting, 204). Given this aim to defend his heritage, David Karel concludes that ‘For the American public, Walker’s art represented the otherness – another people, living in another age, in another country, with other customs,

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speaking another language, in the context of another economy – while in Canada, and more especially in Quebec, the same painting evoked the nation. Here no one doubted that Horatio Walker’s art expressed something of the vivacious authenticity of the founding fathers’ (116). William Brymner (1855–1925), one of Canada’s first great art teachers, shares a similar affection for rural life, as we see in Ils aimaient à lire dans les ruisseaux fuyants (The books they loved they read in running brooks), also from 1885 (figure 4.2), which adds some intriguing dimensions to a similar configuration of components. Here the farmhouse occupies the right foreground, while the creek leads the eye past the fields in the middle to the mountains in the distance. As Janet Braide notes, ‘it is a work of soft beauty, its success created by the sensitive way in which the artist has once again painted tonal relationships. There is a new compositional element on which Brymner would rely again: the central position of one tree’ (31). Indeed, the leaning tree dominates the composition while dividing it diagonally, thereby showcasing the children, whose presence raises issues of family, ancestry, and promise for the future that characterize the writing of the time. Quite atypical is the title, borrowed from Shakespeare’s As You Like It (act two, scene one), which invokes a sense of poetry and the written word to add a cultural dimension, as does the metaphorical use of the word ‘lire’ when applied to a natural phenomenon. Clearly, even for the young French Canadians, nature is a set of signs that can be deciphered – as Lydia Bouchard puts it, ‘un rapport nature / culture qui donne la primauté à une nature familière et sereine’ (20; a nature / culture relationship that favours a familiar and serene view of nature) – yet whose message remains ambivalent, as it does in one of the nineteenth century’s greatest masterpieces, Laure Conan’s Angéline de Montbrun. Angéline de Montbrun: The Interior Landscape First published in 1881–2 in La Revue canadienne, Laure Conan’s Angéline de Montbrun is nearly universally considered to be the first psychological novel in Quebec literature.10 Accordingly, the novel’s landscape representation itself takes on a decidedly psychological tint, as Angéline suggests in a key late entry to her diary: ‘La nature n’est jamais pour nous qu’un reflet, qu’un écho de notre vie intime.’ (189; For us, nature is never more than a reflection, an echo of our intimate life.) The exterior landscape reflects an interior nexus of desires, fears, and meditations, which constitutes the crux of the plot and the thrust of the ideology in this highly complex and beautifully constructed novel.

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4.2 William Brymner, Ils aimaient à lire dans les ruisseaux fuyants, 1885. Huile sur toile, 76,2 x 61 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1979.150. Photo: Patrick Altman / The Books they Loved to Read in Running Brooks, 1885. Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 61 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1979.150. Photo Patrick Altman.

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Indeed, many literary historians further argue that this short novel is also the first aesthetic triumph of French-Canadian fiction.11 The fact that the writer is a woman is all the more exceptional, as Lucie Robert explains: ‘La littérature féminine demeure alors marginale, faute d’avoir pris en charge les dimensions épique, historique et politique du monde … Parallèlement à cette écriture marginalisée apparaît une écriture féminine qui tente d’assumer la fonction esthétique du littéraire et qui contribue à l’émergence d’une parole féminine autonome, c’est-à-dire d’une parole qui construit son propre point de vue.’ (43–4; Feminine literature thus remains marginal, for want of taking account of the epic, historical, and political dimensions of the world … Parallel to this marginalized writing appears a feminine writing that attempts to assume the aesthetic function of literature and contributes to the emergence of an authentic feminine voice, that is, a voice that constructs its own viewpoint.) Angéline de Montbrun begins as an epistolary novel, with letters being exchanged between Maurice Darville, his sister Mina, his future fiancée Angéline, and her father, Charles, a powerfully attractive figure for all three of the young protagonists. Near its midpoint the novel abruptly shifts into a brief narration in the third person, in which we learn of the father’s death, Mina’s decision to enter a convent, and Angéline’s grief, so strong that it leads to a disfiguring accident followed by her returning her engagement ring to Maurice, since, despite his protestations, she perceives a waning of his once fervent love. The rest of the novel consists of ‘feuilles détachées’ (detached leaves), primarily excerpts from Angéline’s intimate diary, revealing memories from the past and her thoughts on love, life, the past, and the future, sprinkled with letters to and from the other protagonists. The final piece is her letter to Maurice renouncing any hope of reconciliation, despite (but also because of) her enduring love for him. The fragmented narration in Angéline de Montbrun not only breaks with the traditional, authoritative (and thus ‘masculine’) narrator to accommodate an emerging feminine voice, but its plurivocality and multiple perspectives lend it the same modern quality of relativity we found in Charles Guérin. Whereas Charles Guérin provided a broader panorama of society, Angéline de Montbrun, largely through the sustained intimate diary, has far greater psychological depth. Despite its first-person, psychologically oriented focus, however, Angéline de Montbrun bears numerous traces of earlier ‘rural novels’ and thus provides a certain continuity in the development of FrenchCanadian fiction. Most of the action takes place at Valriant, the

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Montbrun property in Gaspésie, to the point that Alexandre Amprimoz contends of the novel’s overall structure that ‘Valriant est l’espace, la scène du roman. Quand le destinateur n’est pas à Valriant alors le destinataire y est … La vraie dialectique ne s’établit qu’entre Valriant et le  monde: ce n’est pas avant tout une question de personnages.’ (‘Polarisation,’ 41; Valriant is the space, the setting of the novel. When the [letter] sender isn’t at Valriant, then the recipient is … The real dialectic is only between Valriant and the world; it’s not above all a question of characters.) City life is noticeably absent, though ridiculed rather than vilified, as when Angéline vows to ‘démondaniser’ (desocialize) Mina (47). Like Baptiste Chauvin in La terre paternelle, Charles de Montbrun is an ardent ‘cultivateur,’ so attached to his calling that he goes directly from his wedding ceremony to work in the fields (23). Like Charles Guérin, however, he is educated and wealthy enough that he can avoid the toil, trials, and failures usually associated with farming and in fact dons gloves when tilling the soil. Like Jean Rivard, he is convinced of the patriotic role of agriculture and, with his young followers, debates the role of colonialization in the national mission of Canada (58–9). Charles de Montbrun is, however, far more than a simple ‘cultivateur’: according to Mina, ‘Il y a du paysan, de l’artiste, surtout du militaire dans sa nature, mais il a aussi quelque chose de la finesse du diplomate et de la tendresse de la femme. Le tout fait un ensemble assez rare.’ (37; There is something of the peasant, the artist, especially the soldier in his nature, but he also has some of the diplomat’s finesse and the woman’s tenderness. All told, it makes for a rare combination.) ‘Rare’ perhaps, yet with all his multiple even contradictory facets, Charles de Montbrun is the embodiment of the true French Canadian (see Smart, 27), whose character and values seem modelled, in this case, on those of the ‘ancien canadien’ of the French colonial period. Indeed, Mina bemoans not living in the early ‘heroic’ days of the colony (28), while explaining to her brother that Angéline herself would like to have lived at the time of her cousin François-Gaston de Lévis (29), the revered conqueror of the British at the Battle of Sainte-Foy. M de Montbrun, a direct descendant of de Lévis, is not only Angéline’s father, but also an avowed father figure for Maurice (41), and ‘le plus honnête homme’ (17; the most cultivated man) in the country for Mina, who is clearly in love with him. As with the father in all three novels examined previously, the ramifications of his death (or demise), like the symbolism of his life, will run beyond the personal to the national and mythological dimensions of identity.12

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As with its fictional ancestors, many of the ideological issues brought forth in Angéline de Montbrun involve the culture / nature dialectic; here, the landscape description takes on a decided pattern, a contrast between the limited place of the garden and the vast space of the sea, as we see in an early letter from Maurice to Mina: J’aime cette maison isolée et riante qui regarde la mer à travers ses beaux arbres, et sourit à son jardin par dessus une rangée d’arbustes charmants. Elle est blanche, ce qui ne se voit guère, car des plantes grimpantes courent partout sur les murs, et sautent hardiment sur le toit. Angéline dit: ‘Le printemps est bien heureux de m’avoir. J’ai si bien fait, que tout est vert.’ Aujourd’hui nous avons fait une très longue promenade. On voulait me faire admirer la baie de Gaspé, me montrer l’endroit où Jacques Cartier prit possession du pays en y plantant la croix. Mais Angéline était là, et je ne sais plus regarder qu’elle. Mina, qu’elle est ravissante! J’ai honte d’être si troublé; cette maison charmante semble faite pour abriter la paix. Que deviendrais-je mon Dieu, s’il allait refuser? Mais j’espère. [27–8; I love this isolated, happy house that watches the sea through its beautiful trees, and smiles at its garden across a row of charming bushes. It’s white, though that’s hardly peceptible, since climbing plants cover its walls all over and leap boldly onto the roof. Angéline says: ‘Spring is happy to have me. I’ve done so well that everything is green.’ Today we went on a long walk. They wanted to have me admire the bay of Gaspé and show me the place where Jacques Cartier took possession of the country by planting a cross. But Angéline was there, and I can no longer see anthing but her. Mina, how ravishing she is! I’m ashamed to be so troubled; this house seems made for harbouring peace. What will become of me, God, if he were to refuse? But I’m hoping.]

The passage begins with a clear juxtaposition of the sea (‘mer’) and the garden (‘jardin’), with a precise indication of spatial relationships (‘à travers,’ ‘par dessus,’ ‘partout sur,’ ‘sur’) and a suggestion of colours (‘blanches,’ ‘vert’), but visuality itself is limited: it’s the house, rather than Maurice ‘qui regarde la mer,’ and indeed, instead of looking at the sea and the place where Cartier planted his cross, Maurice has eyes only for Angéline. In part, the paucity of visual detail stems, of course, from the form of narration, the letter, which mitigates against lengthy description in favour of personal detail; but in large measure, nature itself is already seen in psychological terms: Maurice’s passion for Angéline and his fear of her father (‘s’il allait refuser’) colour his view

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of the landscape, as suggested by Conan’s sustained use of personification (‘riante,’ ‘charmants,’ ‘hardiment,’ ‘heureux ’). In addition to the personal and emotional aspects of the landscape, the historical allusion and suggestion of a memorial place brought forth by the reference to Cartier also constitute important dimensions that reappear throughout the novel, which is all the more surprisingly ‘national’ in such a ‘personal’ context. If specific passages involving the landscape in Angéline de Montbrun are less ‘painterly’ than in previous novels, they are of equal or greater significance due to their frequent recurrence and intimate relationship to the drama. Occasionally, as in the previous passage, the two main aspects of the natural landscape are seen together, often the sea perceived through the frame of the garden: ‘À travers le feuillage, j’apercevais la mer tranquille, le ciel radieux.’ (137; Through the foliage I could see the tranquil sea, the radiant sky.) And if the family name, Montbrun (brown mountain), suggests the vast space of nature (like the sea), then the name of their property, Valriant (laughing valley), suggests an enclosed and welcoming place (like the garden).13 In the vast majority of cases, however, the garden and the sea are depicted separately, and, since each element evolves ‘psychologically’ during the course of the novel, they will be treated separately here, beginning with the garden, as does the novel.14 From the outset, Laure Conan depicts the Montbrun garden as an aspect not of culture but of nature. As Mina notes in an early letter: D’ordinaire, j’aime peu les jardins … Mais celui-ci a un air de paradis … Et tout le charme du spontané, du naturel. Vous savez mon horreur pour l’aligné, le guindé, le symétrique. Ici rien de cela, mais le plus gracieux pêle-mêle de gazons, de parterres et de bosquets. Un ruisseau aimable y gazouille et folâtre, et, par-ci par-là, des sentiers discrets s’enfoncent sous la feuillée. [56–7, see also 70; Ordinarily I don’t much care for gardens … But this one has an aura of Paradise … And all its charm is spontaneous, natural. You know my horror for what’s aligned, stiff, symmetrical. Here nothing of that, but the most gracious jumble of lawns, gardens, and groves. A friendly stream babbles and frolics, and, here and there, discrete paths disappear into the trees.]

Unlike the classical French garden, anathema for Mina (‘mon horreur pour l’aligné, le guindé, le symétrique’), the Montbrun garden is natural (‘du naturel’), spontaneous (‘du spontané’), even irrational (‘pêle-

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mêle’). Visual aspects are limited to suggestions of colour and light, along with spatial relations (‘s’enfoncent’), but emotional effects abound, underscored by repetitions of nouns in series (‘de gazons, de parterres et de bosquets’) and personification (‘aimable,’ ‘gazouille,’ ‘folâtre,’ ‘discrets’), which create an overall impression of vivacity, shelter, and Paradise (‘paradis’), all themes that will be carried forth in recurring descriptions of the garden. Though less visual (since the viewer is in love!), Maurice’s initial description of the garden parallels Mina’s: ‘Tu sais peut-être qu’un ruisseau coule dans le jardin, très vaste et très beau. M. de Montbrun en a profité pour se donner le luxe d’un petit étang qui est bien ce qu’on peut voir de plus joli … et le cygne pense de même car il affectionne cet endroit … Il se mirait dans l’eau, y plongeait son beau cou, et longeait fièrement les bords fleuris de ce lac en miniature où se reflétait le soleil couchant.’ (31–2; You know perhaps that a stream runs through the garden, very vast and very beautiful. M de Montbrun took advantage of it to afford the luxury of a pond, which is really the most attractive one could see … and the swan must think likewise since he is attached to this spot … He would gaze at his reflection, plunge his beautiful neck in the water, and proudly follow the flowered shores of this miniature lake that mirrored the setting sun.) Here the pond is seen as a central point in the garden, concentrating and mirroring both the vast nature around it (‘le soleil couchant’) and the swan that floats on its surface (‘il se mirait dans l’eau’). From the beginning of the novel, the garden is a self-contained, self-sufficient world, one of identity between the object (‘le cygne’) and its reflected image, one of transparent meaning, easy to ‘déchiffrer,’ as suggested perhaps in the play of words between le cygne (swan) and its homonym le signe (the sign).15 This very episode in the garden leads Maurice to declare his love (and thus matrimonial intent) to Angéline, whom he has seen from the outset in gardening terms as a ‘flower,’ just as he describes the garden as a ‘paradise.’ Similarly, Angéline sees Valriant, the house and the garden together as a place of shelter and thus happiness – ‘Jamais vous n’avez vu ma chaumière jolie comme cet été. C’est un nid de verdure. On la dirait faite exprès pour abriter le bonheur.’ (113; Never have you seen my cottage as beautiful as this summer. It’s a nest of greenery. One might say it’s made purposely to harbour happiness.) But the seasons change, along with the garden, and as Maurice prepares to leave for France to pursue his studies, Angéline observes an omen: ‘Les gelées ont déjà bien ravagé le jardin. Cette belle verdure que

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vous avez tant regardée, tant admirée, d’un jour à l’autre, je la vois se flétrir. Je vais la voir disparaître et cela m’attriste. C’est la première fois que l’automne me fait cette impression.’ (86; Frosts have already ravaged the garden. That beautiful greenery you looked at so much, admired so much, day by day I see it wither. I’m going to see it disappear, and that saddens me. This is the first time that autumn has given me that impression.)16 After her break-up with Maurice, Angéline’s seasonal impressions of the fading garden become enduring symbols of their broken love and past illusions, as seen in an entry to her diary from 23 May, when flowers and love ought to be flourishing: ‘Je viens de visiter mon jardin … Je regardais le pauvre arbustre, qui n’a plus, à bien dire, que ses épines, et je pensais au jour où Maurice me l’apporta si vert, si couvert de fleurs. Que reste-t-il de ces roses entrouvertes? que reste-t-il de ces parfums? Fanées les illusions de la vie, fanées les fleurs de l’amour!’ (111; I just visited my garden … I was looking at the poor bush, which in truth no longer has anything but its thorns, and I was thinking of the day when Maurice brought it to me, so green, so covered in flowers. What remains of those budding roses? What remains of those scents? Wilted are life’s illusions, wilted the flowers of love!) In addition to the evolution of the garden, from flourishing to fading, from emotive to symbolic, we note the change in Angéline herself, more introspective, more meditative, more profound than the person revealed in her earlier letters. This very passage, by the memory it evokes of Maurice, signals yet another stage in the role of the garden, as it comes to represent a repository of memories and as such becomes bittersweet, ambivalent, as captured in an episode recalling the father’s death, which begins with the verse ‘Ô lumineuse fleur des souvenirs lointains’ (134; Oh luminous flower of distant memories) and ends with the image of the flower worn by Angéline’s father on his last evening on earth (140). While consolation may be found in accepting God’s will (137), it also persists in memory itself, linked as it is to place, as recognized by Angéline in later entries: ‘Je ne saurais m’éloigner de Valriant, où tout me rappelle mon passé si doux, si plein, si sacré.’ (149; I wouldn’t want to go far from Valriant, where everything recalls my past: so sweet, so full, so sacred.) Indeed, the garden is capable of evoking specific memories for Angéline, and the past even seems capable of rebirth, as when she recalls the last time she heard Maurice sing: ‘Comme le passé revient à certains moments, comme le passé, comme la terre rendent ce qu’ils ont pris!’ (194; How the past returns at certain moments, how the past, how the earth,

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render what they have taken!) Maurice has a similar experience of a return of the past, when, unbeknownst to Angéline, he visits the garden during her self-imposed exile: ‘Le passé était là, et qui pourrait dire la tristesse et la douceur de mes pensées!’ (211; The past was there, and who could express the sadness and sweetness of my thoughts!) The past is there, but like the decor itself, the emotional reaction of Maurice is ambivalent (‘la tristesse et la douceur’), as if seeking resolution, and at any rate, the past remains unattainable. Angéline’s response, her last in the novel, acknowledges the memory, while confining it to the past: ‘Le sentiment que vous me conservez, pour moi, c’est une fleur qui embaume les ruines, c’est un écho attendrissant du passé. Le passé!’ (214; The feeling you preserve for me is a flower that gives fragrance to the ruins, a touching echo from the past. The past!) In short, the past is past, and any solution or consolation lies elsewhere, elsewhere than in the past, and elsewhere than in the garden, as we come to discover. Just as the garden evolves from a simple stimulant of emotions to a symbol of those emotions to a repository of memories, the sea follows a similar evolution.17 Indeed, the sea is a necessary counterpoint to the garden, since the infinite nature of vast space is a necessary counterpart of the certainty of closed place, as Angéline meditates in her diary: ‘Nous sommes comme quelqu’un qui, n’ayant jamais vu qu’une feuille, voudrait se représenter une forêt, ou qui, n’ayant jamais vu qu’une goutte d’eau, voudrait imaginer l’océan.’ (190; We are like someone who, having seen but a leaf, would like to imagine a forest, or who, having seen but a drop of water, would like to imagine the ocean.) Here the metaphorical use of nature again illustrates the correlation of outer and inner landscape. The sea tends to inspire profound emotions of a ‘Romantic’ nature, ranging from Maurice’s ‘melancholy’ and Mina’s ‘seduction’ to the mixture of the sublime and the grotesque expressed by Mina’s friend Emma, who is herself about to enter a convent: Jamais la nature ne m’a paru si belle … En attendant qu’il en neige, j’ai un endroit qui fait mes délices. C’est tout simplement un enfoncement au bord de la mer; mais d’énormes rochers le surplombent et semblent toujours prêts à s’écrouler, ce qui m’inspire une crainte mêlée de charme … Il me semble que cet endroit vous plairait parfaitement, surtout quand le soleil laisse tomber sur les vagues, ces belles traînées de feu que vous aimez tant. Ce soir, les plus beaux nuages que j’aie vus s’y miraient dans l’eau. Cela faisait de la mer un fond chatoyant, merveilleux, et j’ai pensé à

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bien des choses.’ [79–80; Never had nature appeared more beautiful to me … While awaiting the snow, I have a place that delights me. It’s simply a recess beside the sea; but enormous rocks overhang it and always seem about to tumble, which incites within me a fear mixed with charm … It seems to me that this place would please you perfectly, especially when the sun lets fall upon the waves those long trains of fire that you love so much. This evening, the most beautiful clouds I’ve seen were reflected in the water. That turned the sea into a marvellous, shimmering backdrop, and I thought of many things.]

Here the sea is clearly emblematic of nature (‘la nature’) in its most beautiful (‘belle’), dangerous (‘prêts à s’écrouler’), passionate (‘feu’), profound (‘un fond’), and ever-changing (‘chatoyant’) aspects. But the sea can also suggest the infinite aspects of aspirations for the future, as Angéline recollects of an episode from her early days with Maurice: ‘Jamais la nature ne m’avait paru si belle. Debout à la fenêtre, je regardais émue, éblouie. Ce lointain immense et magnifique, où la mer éblouissante se confondait avec le ciel, m’apparaissait comme l’image de l’avenir.’ (153; Never had nature appeared so beautiful to me. Standing at the window, I was watching, moved, dazzled. This magnificant, immense remoteness where the dazzling sea melded with the sky seemed to me like the image of the future.) Her vision will prove prophetic, as the sky itself will come to represent future life. If the sea serves to stimulate emotions, especially in early episodes, later, beginning roughly with the death of M de Montbrun, it comes to metaphorically and symbolically represent the very seat of emotions, the ‘heart.’ Angéline formulates the analogy between the sea and the heart in a late entry in her diary: ‘L’un et l’autre ont la profondeur redoutable, la puissance terrible des orages … Qu’est-ce que la tempête arrache aux profondeurs de la mer? qu’est-ce que la passion révèle de notre cœur? La mer garde ses richesses, et le cœur garde ses trésors.’ (184; Both have frightening depth, the terrifying power of storms … What does the tempest wrest from the depths of the sea? What does passion reveal of our heart? The sea guards its riches, and the heart guards its treasures.) Here we witness not only the evolution of the sea, now a symbol, but especially the change in Angéline, who, faced with the death of her father and the separation from her lover, now questions (‘Qu’est-ce’) the very emotions she had once merely experienced. This evolution (of nature and character) stems in large part from Angéline’s increasingly profound readings, including Chateaubriand’s

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Atala, which she cites in an earlier entry and whose wording has clearly affected her own in the passage above: ‘Connaissez-vous le cœur de l’homme, et pourriez-vous compter les inconstances de son désir? Vous calculeriez plutôt le nombre des vagues que la mer roule dans une tempête!’ (173; Do you know the human heart, and could you count its fickle desires? You could better calculate the number of waves rolling in the sea during a tempest!) In addition to its dual psychological role of both stimulating and symbolizing the heart, the sea also epitomizes the passage of time, whose destructive force causes yet further emotions and meditations, as in the following entry from Angéline’s diary: ‘Mais la jolie butte qui abritait ma cabane s’en va rongée par les hautes mers. Un cèdre est déjà tombé et les deux vigoureux sapins dont j’aimais à voir l’ombre dans l’eau, minés par les vagues, penchent aussi vers la terre. Cela m’a fait faire des réflexions dont la tristesse n’était pas sans douceur.’ (146; But the pretty mound that sheltered my cabin is being eaten away by the high seas. A cedar has already fallen, and two hardy firs, whose shadows I loved to watch in the sea, eroded by the waves, are also leaning forward. That evoked reflections whose sadness was not without tenderness.) Here nature, as represented by the sea, is no longer a companion of human emotions, but embodies their destruction. Angéline’s observation is accompanied by a quote from the Bible on the vanity of human enterprise, and indeed in the landscape description itself, with one tree (the cedar) already fallen and two others (the firs) nearing destruction, it is difficult not to see an image of the deceased M de Montbrun, along with his daughter and her fiancé, both barely hanging on. After a similar episode, in which an ash tree overlooking the sea, on which Maurice had inscribed a verse professing love, has been felled (173–4), Angéline comes to describe the sea as the very image of time: ‘La vie s’écroule. Chaque flot en emporte un moment.’ (175; Life crumbles. Each wave removes one of its moments.) Thus the sea, like the garden, bears witness to the destructive force of nature, which governs all things earthbound, including memories and memory itself. In fact, beginning with the inaugural entry in Angéline’s diary, right after the death of her father and her break-up with Maurice, the principal issue of the novel, as is so often the case in French-Canadian fiction, becomes one of memory. The house and garden at Valriant are already, as we have seen, a lieu de mémoire for Angéline, and she sets about turning them into a veritable memorial as she places a lamp before her father’s portrait (103) and prays to it (116), although even this drastic

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measure fails, since, in this highly visual passage, she ends up seeing him dead: ‘J’ai mis son portrait au-dessus de la cheminée … Parfois quand je le contemple, à la lueur un peu incertaine du foyer, je crois qu’il s’anime, qu’il va m’ouvrir le bras, mais c’est l’illusion d’un moment, et aussitôt, je le revois mort.’ (114; I set his portrait above the fireplace … Sometimes when I contemplate it, I believe it’s coming alive, that he will open his arms to me, but it’s a momentary illusion, and soon after, I see him dead again.) If the sea erases memories and the garden fails to perpetuate them, Angéline’s wilful destruction of a medal containing the portraits of her father and Maurice (204) marks the end of her attempt to memorialize the past. In a sense, this key gesture also marks the beginning of her own individuation, the creation of her own identity, independent from that of the father, who wanted to maintain her as a child (33, 35), and from Maurice, who proves unworthy of his father figure, and thus of Angéline: ‘Si Maurice avait la délicatesse de mon père, peut-être auraitil pu me faire oublier que je ne puis plus être aimée.’ (120; If Maurice had my father’s delicacy, perhaps he might have made me forget that I can no longer be loved.) Angéline’s determination to break with the past, in the form of her father’s image, certainly has ramifications for her as a woman,18 but perhaps even more so as a French Canadian. To the degree that we can read Charles de Montbrun as a vestige of the French colonial past, we can also interpret Angéline’s determination to go forward as a message of national import. As early as 1972, in the wake of the Quiet Revolution, Madeleine Gagnon-Mahony had seen the novel as an expression of national rage and resistence: ‘une lecture lucide risquerait de nous renvoyer en plein visage, l’image du colonisé révolté, enragé, et dont le pouvoir de domination et de vengeance n’a pas été enterré sous les Plaines’ (61; a lucid reading would risk throwing back in our faces the image of the colonized, revolted, enraged, and whose powers of domination and vengence were not buried under the Plains [of Abraham]). Maïr Verthuy proposes a similar hypothesis, which she elaborates in some detail, contending that, if the father, who represents the past, is doomed to death, and Maurice, who stands for the new Quebec, flinches in times of crisis, then failure is masculine, and Angéline ‘posits the principle of her own autonomy by refusing to play the game being proposed’ (34). Indeed, it is beyond the father, beyond memory, and even beyond nature, that Angéline de Montbrun ultimately turns to for a solution, figured again in the landscape description:

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J’aime à voir le soleil disparaître à travers les grands arbres de la forêt; la voilà déjà qui dépouille sa parure de lumière pour s’envelopper d’ombre. À l’horizon les nuages pâlissent. On dit beau comme un ciel sans nuages, et pourtant, que les nuages sont beaux lorsqu’ils se teignent des feux du soir! Tantôt en admirant ces groupes aux couleurs éclatantes, je songeais à ce que l’amour de Dieu peut faire de nos peines, puisque la lumière en pénétrant de sombres vapeurs, en fait une merveilleuse parure au firmament. [142; I love to see the sun disappear through the tall trees of the forest; there it is already divesting its finery of light to cover itself in shadow. On the horizon the clouds grow pale. One says beautiful like a cloudless sky, and yet, how beautiful the clouds are when they take on the tints of evening fire! Just after admiring those masses of brilliant colours, I thought about what God’s love can do for our troubles, since the light penetrating the dark vapours creates a beautiful finery in the firmament.]

The passage begins with an indication of visuality (‘voir’), along with notations of light (‘lumière’), colour (‘couleurs éclatantes’), and space (‘à travers … là’). In this latter domain of composition, we note, however, a change from the horizontal orientation (‘À l’horizon’) to a vertical one (‘un ciel … au firmament’), which leads Angéline to the presence of God (‘Dieu’). We also shift from a natural setting to a spiritual drama in which nature (‘la forêt’) loses its beauty (‘parure’) through the disappearance (‘disparaître’) of light and the conquest of shadow (‘pour s’envelopper d’ombre’), but is replaced, as is the sky itself, by the firmament (heavens), where light obliterates shadow (‘la lumière pénétrant de sombres vapeurs’) to renew and enhance the beauty (‘merveilleuse parure’) of the ephemeral clouds.19 The existence of a spiritual life beyond nature, in the supernatural, a term used by Angéline in her last letter (213) – had been suggested from the novel’s outset by many voices. In the epigraph preceding the novel, for example, there appears a quote from Lacordaire: ‘L’avez-vous cru que cette vie fût la vie?’ (9; Did you believe that this life was life?), which, Carr notes, was repeated before each of the fourteen instalments in the original serial publication of the novel (1000). Mina’s friend Emma, about to enter the convent, speaks of another garden, another paradise, which is not earthly: ‘Je regrette beaucoup ce beau paradis, ce jardin de volupté où l’on n’aurait jamais vu de boue; la boue vient en droiture du péché. Mais toujours, chère amie, le vrai ciel nous reste.’ (79; I miss greatly this beautiful paradise, this voluptuous garden where mire would never be seen; mire comes directly from sin. But always,

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dear friend, the true sky remains for us.) In its brief appearance, the third-person narrative voice pronounces with near divine conviction that ‘un événement tragique prouva cruellement que le bonheur est une plante d’ailleurs qui ne s’acclimate jamais sur terre’ (94; a tragic event will cruelly prove that happiness is a plant from elsewhere that never grows on earth). After her father’s death a family friend writes that mercy is to be found in the heavens (123), and the parish priest, who later becomes a missionary, advises her to look to the heavens (109). Throughout Angéline’s diary, the terms ‘ciel’ and ‘lumière’ are used to suggest a higher realm than that of nature.20 In fact, the novel is constructed not only antithetically, around the contrast between the garden and the sea, but also dialectically, around a third term, le ciel, which transcends not only the garden and the sea, but also itself, since it changes in definition from sky (natural) to heaven (supernatural).21 Since both garden and sea are natural phenomena, they bear a common defect, impermanence, seen in their fragility and destructiveness respectively, but this common fault can be transcended by the permanence of the supernatural, represented by the sky, which simply moves the novel to a higher plane, a higher landscape. We can thus represent the novel’s ostensible structure as follows: Sky

} Garden ÅÆ Sea

Supernatural (permanence) that is:

} Nature (impermanence)

If I say ‘ostensible,’ it is because the solution itself is not of this world, and, short of entering a convent, which neither Angéline de Montbrun nor Laure Conan chooses to do, only one other solution remains, one common to both character and author, and one essential to preserving the French-Canadian identity: writing. As Lori Saint-Martin succinctly concludes in her ‘Postface’ to the novel, ‘En effet, c’est par l’écriture qu’Angéline naît à l’existence.’ (229–30; In effect, it is through writing that Angéline comes to life.)22 Certainly, the dramatization of the act of writing in Angéline de Montbrun makes of the character the mirror image of the author, and of the novel a prime and prototypical example of a nested structure termed ‘mise en abyme.’23 Early in her self-imposed exile, in which Angéline has turned to writing her diary, she also turns to reading books of a higher order: ‘Je m’en tiens surtout aux livres de religion et d’histoire. J’ai besoin d’élever mon cœur en haut, et j’aime à voir revivre, sous mes yeux, ces

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gloires, ces grandeurs qui sont maintenant poussière.’ (113; I hold especially to books of religion and history. I need to elevate my heart on high, and I love to see reliving before my eyes those glories and grandeurs that are now dust.) Indeed, great works not only elevate the soul (‘élever mon cœur’) but enable the reader to relive the past (‘voir revivre, sous mes yeux, ces gloires’), on a higher order (‘ces grandeurs’) than the personal (‘maintenant poussière’). Certainly Angéline’s diary quotes heavily from religious works, such as those of Lacordaire (117) and la mère Marie de l’Incarnation (121), but she also continues to cite the personal poetry of Eugénie de Guérin (133) and acknowledges the truth of Charles Sainte-Foi’s notion that a good book should always form a true bond between writer and reader (171). Such is the number of references and citations in the novel that Nicole Bourbonnais characterizes it as a ‘palimpsest’ (84), and by inserting the text within a chain of literary ancestors, Conan comes curiously close to mirroring the process of memorialization, which will make of the novel a monument in its own right.24 Angéline pays special homage to the historian François-Xavier Garneau (chapter one), precisely because of his ability to rescue the past from the flow of time: ‘L’histoire me distrait plus efficacement que toutes les autres lectures. Je m’oublie devant ce rapide fleuve des âges.’ (185; History distracts me more efficiently than all other types of reading. I forget myself before this swift river of the ages.) Garneau’s writings not only resurrect Angéline’s own ancestors, like de Lévis, but raise an entire people from defeat and loss to a newfound identity. Angéline praises Garneau’s courage in forming himself as a writer (187) and weeps when she visits his monument, which lies not far from the resting ground of the heroes he has rescued from oblivion (188). Moreover, Angéline expresses regret that she herself had not written more in earlier days, in order to preserve the beauty of what is now past: ‘Je regrette de n’avoir rien écrit alors que ma vie ressemblait à ces délicieuses journées de printemps, où l’air est si frais, la verdure si tendre, la lumière si pure. J’aurais du plaisir à revoir ces pages. J’y trouverais un parfum du passé.’ (150; I regret having written nothing at the time my life resembled one of those delicious spring days when the air is so fresh, the greenery so tender, the light so pure. I would take pleasure in seeing such pages again. I would find therein the scent of the past.) Writing might have preserved the air of the sea, the greenery of the garden, and the light of the sky for Angéline, but is this not, in fact, precisely what Laure Conan has done: write about and thus preserve Angéline’s past? And in so doing has Laure Conan not secured her own

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identity as a woman writer? Has Laure Conan in her novel, like Angéline in her diary, not achieved a spiritual life by writing about spirituality? Has Angéline de Montbrun itself not become a literary monument and a national memorial, resisting the ‘corrosive bite’ of time and preserving the French-Canadian identity? Has Laure Conan, as a writer, not herself achieved what Angéline de Montbrun had ascribed to Garneau: ‘la reconnaissance immortelle de tous les Canadiens’ (188; the immortal recognition of all Canadians)? Characterizing Conan’s novel as ‘a bomb in the Father’s House,’ Patricia Smart finds that ‘reading Angéline as a novel of feminine resistance and rebellion, we see that the paradise of the first part of the novel is the world of patriarchal power from which women must emerge in order to accede to their own subjectivity, and that Angéline’s “fall” is a fall into writing’ (26). Smart concludes, however, that despite her resistence, Angéline is ultimately ‘defeated’ by the paternal power structure (57).25 Fernand Roy, on the contrary, finds that Angéline attains another zone that transcends human time and emphasizes (through italics no less) that such transcendence does not require religion but occurs through writing itself: ‘Pour entendre que les mots font sens dans un temps autre, celui de l’énonciation, il n’est pas nécessaire de nommer ce temps un temps “divin” et d’aliéner ainsi le sujet parlant.’ (‘Laure,’ 194; To understand that words have meaning in another time, that of their enunciation, it is not necessary to name this time ‘divine’ and thus alienate it from the speaking voice.) Moreover, in redefining herself, Laure Conan solidifies and even reforges national identity, since history itself, as Roy concludes elsewhere, is ultimately a matter of writing (‘L’histoire,’ 347). And, I hasten to add, borrowing Fernand Dumont’s terms (from Le lieu), history, as written into and through the novel, moves beyond the past – in terms not only of personal ties but also of societal traditions – and forward towards the future. If indeed writing, a high form of culture that leads to a higher form of ‘second culture,’ emerges as a primary aspect of spirituality in Angéline de Montbrun, we might modify our earlier chart as follows to return to the dialectical pairing of culture and nature that underlies our overall study of literature and painting, albeit, in this case, from a ‘spiritual’ perspective: Sky

}that is: Garden ÅÆ Sea

Writing / Spirituality

} Earthly life

Culture (permanence)

that is:

}

Nature (impermanence)

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Pierre Nepveu also sees the struggle between culture (the text) and nature (the wilderness) as the pivotal issue in Angéline de Montbrun: ‘Le texte romanesque, à plusieurs voix, ne cesse de citer, il convoque toute une culture … mais – et c’est là un second trait lié au premier – pour plonger celle-ci dans un univers sauvage, à la fois tumultueux et dévasté.’ (‘La maison,’ 80; The text of the novel, through several voices, quotes incessantly; it convokes an entire culture … but – and this is a second trait linked to the first – in order to immerse culture into the wilderness, at once tumultuous and devastated.) For Nepveu this struggle is central to the French-Canadian experience of the New World and its expression in literature, and he also ascribes to Laure Conan a unique position within this tradition as the first native-born writer to attempt to transcribe a spiritual experience of the New World (90). Nepveu equates spirituality with religion, but in the sense that its transcendency also characterizes writing itself, one might award Angéline de Montbrun yet another accolade in the development of FrenchCanadian fiction: the first novel about writing itself, which, along with painting, will assert itself as the ultimate form of preserving national and personal identity as we move forward into the twentieth century. The Spiritual and Symbolic Landscape: Conan and Leduc It would, of course, be impossible in a single painting to suggest the complexity of a novel like Angéline de Montbrun, especially since the landscapes in the novel are essentially interior ones reflecting the emotions of the characters, but several paintings of the period, including one by Conan herself and another by the enigmatic Ozias Leduc, can serve to evoke various aspects of the novel. Laure Conan, like many educated young women of her time, practised painting, as evidenced by her early Paysage de Neuville, circa 1900 (figure 4.3). Although the work is not highly polished, it is highly revealing, as Roger LeMoine suggests in his caption: ‘Dans ce paysage – le seul qui nous soit parvenu – Laure Conan a dépeint une jeune femme, placée entre deux arbres, qui fixe son attention sur un homme plus âgé dont elle est séparée par une clôture quasi inaccessible. Ainsi a-t-elle voulu exprimer, comme dans son oeuvre écrite, l’impossibilité qui fut la sienne d’atteindre l’être aimé.’ (32–3; In this landscape – the only surviving one – Laure Conan has depicted a young woman, placed between two trees, who fixes her attention on an older man from whom she is separated by

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4.3 Laure Conan, Paysage de Neuville, vers 1900. Illustration dans Laure Conan (édition préparée et présentée par Roger Le Moine), Œuvres romanesques. Tome 1: Un amour vrai / Angéline de Montbrun (Montreal: Éditions Fides, collection ‘du Nénuphar, 48,’ 1974). Courtesy of Éditions Fides / Landscape at Neuville, circa 1900. Illustration in Laure Conan (edition prepared and presented by Roger Le Moine), Œuvres romanesques, vol. 1.

a nearly inaccessible enclosure. She wanted thus to express, as in her written work, the impossibility that was hers to reach the loved one.) Noting that the female figure is not only excluded but also imprisoned between the towering twin trees in the centre, Patricia Smart sees the painting less in personal terms than as an emblem of Conan’s gender dilemma: ‘Could it be that Laure Conan has depicted her own ambivalence towards her sex and her culture? Looked at from a modern feminist perspective, the painting does in fact evoke the situation of a woman writer without a “context” for her writing, one who finds herself condemned by biology to remaining on the “margin” of culture’ (22–3). Seen from a purely visual perspective, however, may we not ask

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whether, in fact, it is not the woman who has the upper hand (land) in this painting, much as she does by means of the narration in Angéline de Montbrun? Here it is the composition that not only places her on higher ground, but on far more extensive ground, the upper part of the canvas, occupying fully 80 per cent of the canvas. Judging from the flexed right knee, the young woman seems to be moving upward and onward, not transfixed by the male figure, as LeMoine and Smart see it. Furthermore, whereas the man in the lower foreground is relegated to the shadows, light infuses the upper slope, which ascends vertically, through the fertile pastures, towards the sky, which is itself, as we have seen in Conan’s prose, a symbol of spirituality and transcendence. In this regard, it is perhaps the painter Ozias Leduc who demonstrates the closest kinship to Laure Conan. Both are fervent Roman Catholics, albeit Leduc in a more progressive, less traditional way, as Robert Fulford explains in setting the historical context for this ‘transcendental’ painter: ‘He came to see faith, science and art as interconnected elements of existence that he could bring together in his work, an idea he drew from the historical air he breathed in his youth. He came of age when Catholic intellectuals were influenced by Leo XIII, who devoted his papacy (1878–1903) to reconciling Christianity with the new world created by science’ (49). Both Conan and Leduc are also frequently cast as standard-bearers of French-Canadian nationalism, although Leduc in a less doctrinarian, more emblematic way, as evidenced in the articles of his friend, the critic Robert de Roquebrune, who ‘makes a case not for the mere preservation of traditional modes of artistic expression, but for the development of a vital and truly French-Canadian visual culture’ (Gehmacher, ‘Authenticity,’ 47). In effect, both are also often billed as bridges from traditional to modern means of expression. Like Conan, Leduc finds art to be ‘transcendent’ and ‘symbolic’ (Beaudry, Ozias Leduc: Les paysages, 9, 10). Much as Conan saw nature as an echo of the inner self and the landscape as a reflection of that relationship, Louise Beaudry finds that for Leduc ‘le paysage constitue un espace dans lequel il dévoile l’essentiel de sa propre complicité avec la nature’ (the landscape constitutes a space in which he unveils the essence of his own complicity with nature).26 Like Conan, Leduc uses the sky and light to suggest spirituality and verticality to connote transcendence (Beaudry, Ozias Leduc: Les paysages, 11, 12). Leduc even wrote a poem on a garden resembling Paradise (see Lacroix, Ozias, 31) and included gardens in several paintings, but his Le Cumulus bleu, which dates from 1913 (plate 5), is perhaps the

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most complete thematic and stylistic equivalent of Angéline de Montbrun.27 In this painting, nature, in the form of the twisted trees and brush in the middle ground, resists culture, represented by the fences and fields surrounding it. If we enter the picture space through the diagonal lines of the fence in the lower left corner, it leads us immediately to the mutilated tree in the foreground, whose splintered shaft bears witness to the force of nature, whether through an accident like a lighting strike or high winds, or simply by the passage of time.28 It reaches upward, however, into the blue cloud and towards the sunlit sky, which seem to transcend the nature / culture division with their suggestion of spirituality, reinforced by the luminosity, the high horizon line, and the vertical blocking of the canvas. Indeed, Beaudry notes of the painting that ‘the direction of the reading is vertical, evoking the transition towards a certain spirituality’ (Ozias Leduc: Les paysages, 24), but, linking the tree’s state to that of mankind, she sees this spirituality as unattainable: ‘In Blue Cumulus, two forms are contrasted – the broken, blasted tree and the cloud. Spiritual fervour is represented by the damaged tree. Man is face to face with God. Everything points to his desire to become one with Him, including the branches and roughened trunk of the tree, from which a point rises up to touch the pictorial area defined by the sky … But Man’s flawed state prevents him from doing so. The dark mass of the cumulus, symbolizing the link between the earthly and the divine, drives away all hope: the cloud obscures the heavenly light’ (23–4). In a detailed review article Arlene Gehmacher points out inconsistencies in Beaudry’s reading of Leduc’s symbolism, particularly in the meaning attributed to the cloud: ‘She uses this interpretation of the “universal” cloud to justify the spiritual interpretation that the painting refers to man’s desire to attain God. But then she makes this same cloud do double duty as a particularized cloud, massive and opaque, obscuring the heavenly light and leading to [a] quite different spiritual interpretation’ (‘Les paysages,’ 194). Both critics are in agreement, however, concerning the spirituality inherent in Le Cumulus bleu, which provides a striking analogy to and perspective on Angéline de Montbrun. As singular as was his art, Ozias Leduc is, according to Esther Trépanier, most easily read as a symbolist: ‘La lecture parfois ambiguë de l’espace, qui découle notamment des effets de concavité / convexité … les textures variées à l’intérieur d’une même surface, la stylisation, souvent décorative, des motifs végétaux, l’arabesque utilisée dans le rendu des sapins, des collines, des coulées de neige ou de la fumée sont autant d’éléments qui, d’un point de vue formel, rattachent Leduc à

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l’esthétique symboliste.’ (14; The sometimes ambiguous reading of space that stems notably from effects of concavity / convexity … the varied textures within the same surface, the stylization, often decorative, of vegetal motifs, the arabesque used for rendering firs, hills, flows of snow or smoke are all elements that, from a formal standpoint, tie Leduc to the symbolist aesthetic.) Ultimately, it seems to me, it is also as a symbolist that we can best read Laure Conan. It also appears to me that such a reading of Angéline de Montbrun becomes all the more possible, even compelling, by the very comparison of the text with the paintings that constitute its cultural context, a point relevant also to Jean Rivard and indeed to all of the texts we have been examining, and a point certainly to be developed more fully in the conclusion of this study.

Chapter Five

Impressionism and Nationalism in the Early Twentieth Century

Few would deny that the dawning of the twentieth century was accompanied by a profound sense of change and complexity across the globe, felt all the more acutely, perhaps, by the French-Canadian nation, for whom tradition and simplicity had been promoted by the previous generation of leaders, thinkers, and artists. The first two decades of the new era saw an unprecedented explosion in means of communication (telephone, telegraph, gramophone, cinema, radio, and mass distribution of newspapers) and transportation (appearance of the automobile, motorcycle, dirigible, and airplane; expansion of intercontinental railways, metropolitan buses and taxis, and trans-Atlantic sea travel on super liners), not to mention increasing industrialization and urbanism in Quebec, and the global perspective demanded by participation in the Boer War, the First World War, the Olympic games, and the League of Nations (Société des nations).1 Typical of a tendency towards self-contradiction – as Jocelyn Létourneau describes it: ‘le repli et l’initiative, la tradition et l’envie d’étrangeté, la fidélité à l’héritage et le désir de refondation’ (12–13; withdrawal and initiative, tradition and difference, faithfulness to heritage and the desire for revision) – the French-Canadian intellectual and artistic community split into conservative and progressive movements, termed ‘la querelle entre régionalistes et exotiques’ (152; the quarrel between regionalists and exotics) by Biron, Dumont, and Nardout-Lafarge. But even conservatism, resistance to change, in itself proves the very pervasiveness of change, which must be accounted for, just as Quebec’s expanding position in the world must cause it to define the national identity in view of its specificity as well as its opposition to (and thus in terms of) English-speaking Canada (Catholic-Protestant, rural-urban,

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spiritual-materialist, etc.). The call of the conservative critic Camille Roy to treat Canadian subjects in a Canadian manner – ‘Traiter des sujets canadiens et les traiter d’une façon canadienne’2 – is widely heeded, and as regionalists and exotics alike take up the question of national specificity, along with the obvious factors of language and religion, the less evident but ever-present landscape appears. Specific to the northern North American landscape is, of course, the topography: the rugged terrain, winding rivers, broad lakes, and primeval forests explored by the Ontario-based Group of Seven painters, but also the unique combination of rivers and mountains alongside fields and villages of the Laurentian valley, featured in Quebec art. Specific to the landscape also is the climate, especially the radical transformations brought on by changes of season: the autumn colours, the wintry snows, the spring thaws, and the summer sun. Specific also is the North American flora for a writer like Frère Marie-Victorin and its ‘snowscapes’ for painters like Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Maurice Cullen, James Wilson Morrice, and Clarence Gagnon. Both phenomena lie on the side of ‘nature,’ but art itself is a form of ‘culture,’ fast becoming all the more selfstanding and ‘Canadian’ in the early twentieth century. The turn of the century also marks a turning point in landscape representation, both visual and verbal. Rather than focus on the description of objects, as in Jean Rivard, or the reflection of an observer, as in Angéline de Montbrun, the landscape begins to involve observation itself, the mutual transformation of the landscape and the viewer by the very act of seeing, a dynamic process involving at once reception and projection. Rather than reworking nature through artistic pruning, as in Jean Rivard, or seeking analogues for ones feelings, as in Angéline de Montbrun, nature is transformed through the lens of culture, inherent in vision. And if culture tended to take the form of religion in the short story (chapter two) and agriculture in the early novel (chapter three), it assumes the status of art in the early twentieth century, and a specific type of art that accommodates the changes and complexity inherent in its natural and cultural context. Beyond the imposition of a rational order on the setting (as in the Classical manner) or the investment of emotion in specific places (as in the Romantic mode), the modern landscape is transformed by perception and artistry, by the vision of the artist. It is no accident that this crucial period in Canadian painting and literature coincides with the dominance of French Impressionism, which involves new ways of seeing and representing the landscape. With its innovative approaches to

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the handling of light, colour, atmosphere, and movement,3 Impressionism seems ideally suited to representing not only the topography but especially the transformations specific to the North-American landscape due to seasonal changes: hence the coupling of Impressionism and nationalism for many French-Canadian painters and writers of the early twentieth century. In some cases, especially in painting, one can speak of direct influence, since, as Dennis Reid points out, ‘by 1890 virtually every artist of note under the age of thirty aspired to study in the French capital’ (A Concise History, 91). In other cases, innovation stems, rather, from the confrontation with an increasingly complex world, from a multifaceted and dynamic perspective, as is the case with the writings of Frère MarieVictorin, a self-proclaimed conservative nationalist,4 whose writings are, nonetheless, in many respects remarkably modern. Croquis laurentiens That the renowned scientist Frère Marie-Victorin, professor of botany at the Université de Montréal and founder of its Institut Botanique as well as the Montreal Botanical Gardens, would choose to write a literary text with a title borrowed from painting (croquis = sketches) suggests the degree to which he sees the two art forms as complementary. Indeed, at various points in his Croquis laurentiens (1920), Marie-Victorin equates the poet and the painter (38, 239), regrets not being a painter (106), and exhorts the painters of his land to choose the very regional subjects that he is ‘painting’ verbally (158). Marie-Victorin’s Croquis describe his impressions of various aspects of the Laurentian landscape, beginning with the region near Montreal, with which we are already familiar through the works of Cartier,5 Champlain, and Garneau (chapter one), not to mention Beaugrand (chapter two) and Lacombe (chapter three). Limited by the practical concerns of discovery, settlement, and historical accuracy on the one hand, and slanted by a vivid imagination coloured by humour or poverty on the other, these previous descriptions seem simple in comparison with those of MarieVictorin, who begins his depiction of ‘La montagne de Belœil’ by laying out the overall setting in geological terms: Bubons volcaniques, bavures éruptives marquant la ligne de faiblesse dans l’écorce de la vieille planète, les Montérégiennes ont résisté mieux que les argilites environnantes à l’inéluctable travail d’érosion qui remodèle sans cesse la face de la terre. Elles s’élèvent maintenant au-dessus de la grande

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plaine laurentienne, modestes d’altitude, mais dégagées de toutes parts et commandant d’immenses horizons. Le mont Royal et sa nécropole, les petits lacs clairs du Saint-Bruno, les prairies naturelles et les pinières du Rougemont ont chacun leurs charmes particuliers, mais la montagne de Belœil semble avoir toujours été la favorite des poètes, des artistes et, en général des amants de la nature. [38; Volcanic swellings, eruptive traces marking the fault line in the crust of the old planet, the Monteregian Hills have resisted, better than the surrounding metamorphic rock, the inescapable work of erosion that ceaselessly remodels the face of the earth. They now rise over the great Laurentian plain, modest in altitude, but standing out from everywhere and commanding immense horizons. Mount Royal and its necropolis, the small, clear Saint-Bruno lakes, the natural prairies and pinestands of Rougemont each have their own special charms, but the Beloeil Mountain seems to have always been the favourite of poets, artists, and nature-lovers in general.]

Viewed initially through the filter of a scientist and from a vast perspective that temporally reaches back into earlier geological ages and spatially encompasses all of the mountains in the Monteregian group with only a few salient visual details sufficient to distinguish the separate entities lying on the plain, the description narrows in on Beloeil Mountain and adopts an artistic lens (‘des poètes, des artistes’), which also accommodates the general public (‘des amants de la nature’). The scientific vocabulary strung together alliteratively (‘bubons … bavures’) and yielding to personification (‘modestes … commandant’) shows a mixture of lexical registers that prefigures the prose poetry of Francis Ponge, which also envisions objects through many lenses and from multiple perspectives. This paragraph alone is an apt illustration of the complex meeting of the sciences and the arts that constitutes Marie-Victorin’s vision of the world. As his principal biographer, Robert Rumilly sums up the writer’s approach: ‘L’observation réaliste est colorée par l’imagination, sans laquelle l’écrivain nous donnerait de simples photographies. Le Frère MarieVictorin observe en savant et décrit en artiste.’ (75; Realistic observation is coloured by imagination, without which the writer would give us simple photographs. Frère Marie-Victorin observes as a scientist and describes as an artist.) From his initial distant viewpoint, across time and space, MarieVictorin then moves afoot gradually, physically, up the mountain to the summit, from which he then looks out over the plains, which had been his previous vantage point:

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Encore quelques centaines de pieds et nous sautons sur la table de roc poli qui domine tout le massif et, disons-le tout de suite, toute la plaine laurentienne. Quel éblouissement! La montagne entière, la féerie des verts harmonisés des érables, des hêtres, des chênes et des bouleaux, et, au fond de la coupe, de l’écrin plutôt, l’opale mal taillée du lac Hertel. Sous nos yeux, comme sur la page ouverte d’un gigantesque atlas, toute une vaste portion de la Laurentie! Nous embrassons d’un regard l’entrée du lac Champlain et la bouche du Richelieu, Saint-Hyacinthe et Montréal, l’éparpillement des villages et des hameaux depuis le fleuve jusqu’à la frontière américaine! Comme une longue et brillante écharpe oubliée en travers le paysage, le Richelieu coupe en deux toute la contrée, bouillonne un peu vers Saint-Jean, s’élargit en lac à Chambly, passe à nos pieds en coulée d’argent et s’en va, portant bateaux et ponts, mirant les arbres, les chaumières et les clochers, vers la buée indécise qui marque l’emplacement de Sorel. [39; Still a few hundred feet and we step onto the table of polished rock that dominates the whole massif and, let’s say so right away, the whole Laurentian plain. What a spectacle! The entire mountain, the extravaganza of the harmonized greens of the maples, beeches, oaks, and birches, and, at the far end of the section, of the bower rather, the poorly sculpted opal of Lake Hertel. Beneath our eyes, like the open page of a gigantic atlas, a whole vast portion of Laurentia! We embrace in a single gaze the entrance to Lake Champlain and the mouth of the Richelieu, Saint-Hyacinthe and Montreal, the scattering of villages and hamlets from the river up to the American border! Like a long and brilliant scarf left behind in the landscape, the Richelieu cuts the whole countryside in two, foams a bit towards Saint-Jean, becomes a lake at Chambly, passes beneath our feet as a silver flow and goes away, bearing boats and bridges, reflecting trees, cottages and steeples, towards the indistinct mist that marks the site of Sorel.]

The description now becomes much more visual, with its initial designation of viewpoint (‘la table de roc qui domine tout le massif’) and its continued insistence on vision (‘sous nos yeux,’ ‘nous embrassons d’un regard’). After an overall impression (‘Quel éblouissement’), true to the craft of painter, as he was earlier to that of poet, Marie-Victorin notes various shades of green (‘des verts harmonisés’), which contrast with the blue of the lake in the crater below. It is only after registering these purely visual qualities that he then relies on culture to structure nature, as he comes to see the landscape as a sign-system derived from a geography book (‘comme sur la page ouverte d’un gigantesque atlas’). He then records the overall vast composition (‘une vaste portion de la

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Laurentie’), first at a single viewing (‘d’un regard’), where the various reference points are given as nouns, occupying fixed places on the grid, then by scanning the grid, following the movement of the Richelieu River, rendered though a series of active verbs, which become progressively visual in their rendering. In the phrase ‘portant bateaux et ponts,’ for example, the Richelieu River can indeed move boats, but only the eye can make the bridges seem to move, as it scans the horizon towards its eventual vanishing point, ‘la buée indécise qui marque l’emplacement de Sorel.’ Here, the visual impression formed by distance and atmosphere (‘la buée indécise’) is complemented by a detail that can come only from the viewer’s memory (‘qui marque l’emplacement de Sorel’). In its insistence on a general impression, on effects of colour, light, and atmosphere, on the limits of vision itself (‘indécise’), the description can indeed be described as ‘Impressionist,’ but, at the same time, the underlying structure provided by the grid of reference points stemming from knowledge (‘la page ouverte’) and memory (‘l’emplacement de Sorel’) lends it further dimensions of a rational nature. This combination of Impressionist fluidity and architectural solidity, like those of space and place, nature and culture, is, I contend, typical of landscape representation in Quebec. Marie-Victorin’s description from his vantage point on Beloeil Mountain continues in the following paragraph (not given here) by focusing on specific aspects of the landscape, especially the trees, but the wilderness (‘la forêt primitive’) has long since yielded, in this cradle of North American civilization, to agriculture in the form of rectilinear plots that give the landscape the appearance of a chessboard and to the lines of roads and railways that have, as he says in the subsequent paragraph (also not included here), imposed on nature ‘ce filet aux larges mailles qui la tient captive’ (40; this wide-mesh net that holds it captive). Yet the squares of these grids are filled in with fields of different shades of green in spring (‘tous les tons du vert’), then yellow and gold in summer (‘tous les jaunes et tous les ors’), then purple and scarlet in fall (‘le pourpre et l’écarlate’), which are all expressed as nouns (the nominal form), promoting the colour from the status of attribute to that of entity. Variety is a product not only of the different species of trees and their colours, but, especially of the seasons, like autumn, which brings the complementary shades of red into contrast with the greens of springtime, with its flowers and mere memories of winter, which MarieVictorin will describe in greater detail in a later entry. At this point, he goes on to imagine further dimensions in the landscape:

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On resterait ici longtemps! On voudrait voir le soleil entrer, au matin, en possession de son domaine, voir la nuit venir par le même chemin et prendre sa revanche! On se reporterait facilement au temps où toute cette plaine n’était qu’une seule masse houleuse de feuillages, parcourue, le long des rivières, par des troupes de barbares nus. On verrait les chapelets de canots iroquois descendre rapidement sur l’eau morte; on verrait les beaux soldats du Roi de France, dans leurs barques pontées, monter vers le lac Champlain, couleurs déployées. Sans doute, l’endroit où nous sommes était un poste d’observation, et pris par mon rêve, j’ai presque peur, en me retournant, de trouver debout sur le rocher quelque guerrier tatoué d’Onondaga appuyé sur son arc! ... Mais non! Tout cela est passé sans retour, poussière et cendre! Et même une autre histoire, superposée à la première, a disparu à son tour. Dans le rocher qui nous porte, sont encore visibles de fortes fiches de fer, restes évidentes d’une construction ancienne. Il y eut ici, en effet, autrefois, un pèlerinage très fréquenté, et auquel reste attaché le nom de monseigneur de Forbin-Janson, le célèbre missionnaire français qui nous appelait ‘le peuple aux coeurs d’or et aux clochers d’argent!’ [41–2; One could remain here for a long time! One would like to see the sun enter, in the morning, and take possession of its domain, then night fall by the same path and take its revenge! One would readily return to the time when the entire plain was a single rolling mass of foliage, traversed, along the rivers, by bands of naked barbarians. One would see strings of Iroquois canoes descend rapidly on the still waters; one would see the handsome soldiers of the French King, in their decked boats, ascend towards Lake Champlain, with colours flying. No doubt the place where we are used to be an observation post, and captured by my dream, I’m almost afraid to turn around and find standing on the rock some tattooed Onondaga warrior leaning on his bow! ... But no! All that is in the past, dust and ashes! And even another moment in history, superimposed onto the first, has in turn disappeared. In the rock that bears us, still visible, are iron pegs, evident remnants of an ancient edifice. In fact, this was once a very busy pilgrimage spot, to which remains attached the name of Monseigneur Forbin-Janson, the famous French missionary who called us ‘the people with hearts of gold and steeples of silver!’]

In addition to the changes in lighting brought on by the passage of the day, Marie-Victorin muses on the changes in civilization brought on by the passage of time, thus adding layers of past scenes onto those of the landscape before him. His images of Amerindians, then French soldiers, are expressed in the conditional tense, purely hypothetically, as is

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that of the Indian warrior he imagines behind him.6 But as he turns away from the vast space of his panoramic view of the plains, he remembers another layer of the past, ‘superimposed’ onto the previous one, and confined to the limited space close by, once occupied by a chapel and a missionary, whose resurrection leads to a perception of French-Canadian identity (‘le peuple aux coeurs d’or’), itself guaranteed by other sites of memory (‘aux clochers d’argent’), steeples he had earlier labelled as ‘symbolic’ as he perceived them dotting the plains (41). It is in these passages that the dimension of nationalism joins that of Impressionism to create a complex landscape that seems, indeed, specifically French-Canadian in nature. One could argue justifiably that this vast multilayered landscape of the Laurentian plains lies far beyond the reach of a single painting, much less that of a ‘sketch,’ but many of Marie-Victorin’s croquis are more limited in scope and are eminently painterly. Several pages later, for example, he attains his longed-for vision of a landscape in spring, here from a perspective overlooking ‘Le lac seigneurial de Saint-Bruno’: Avril. Tout frais libéré de la salle de glace qui pesait sur lui depuis cinq mois, le lac riait hier de toute la joie de ses eaux neuves, bleues d’un bleu d’acier. Les petites vagues léchaient alertement les derniers croutons de glace poussés par le rivage et qui, sur l’autel du printemps, sacrifiaient au soleil leurs âmes fugaces de cristal! En cette saison, les bois de montagne laissent voir des lignes et des couleurs que le vrai printemps et l’été cèleront sous la prodigalité des frondaisons. Ainsi, sur les flancs du grand vase de basalte au fond duquel palpite le lac, rien ne dérobe le tapis de dépouilles de l’autre saison, laminées et polies par le poids des neiges. La souple marqueterie des feuilles mortes épouse et trahit toutes les vallécules du sous-bois, met en valeur le pied moussu des arbres et les ruines lichéneuses des souches anciennes. Sur ce fond brun, si délicatement nuancé, jaillit en gerbe l’élan gracieux des fins bouleaux qui ont des calus noirs aux aisselles. Plus haut, là-bas, quelque chose me dit que cette vaporeuse teinte grise est faite de la multitude des rameaux encore nus de l’érable. Les grands pins noirs, les grands pins verts – ils sont l’un et l’autre – saillent dans ce soleil de mi-avril. Rien ne gêne encore leur tête immobile et crépue, qui se silhouette vivement sur ce fond de clarté, comme pétrifiée dans le temps qui passe sur elle, toujours pareil. [45; April. Freshly freed from the icy room that weighed it down for five months the lake was laughing yesterday with all the joy of its new waters, in blues of steel blue. Small waves alertly licked the last crusts of ice pushed out from the shores

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and which, on spring’s altar, sacrificed their fleeting souls of crystal to the sun! In this season the mountain woods allow for seeing lines and colours that full spring and summer will conceal under the abundance of foliage. Thus, on the flanks of the great basaltic vase at whose bottom the lake palpitates, nothing hides the carpet of remnants from the other seasons, laminated and polished by the weight of snow. The supple mosaic of dead leaves espouses and reveals all the least vales of the underbrush, displays the mossy feet of the trees and the lichenous ruins of ancient stumps. Against this brown backdrop, so delicately nuanced, spring forth sprays of the graceful growth of the slender birches, which have black calluses on their axils. Higher, farther away, something tells me that this vaporous grey tint stems from the multitude of still-naked maple branches. The great black pines, the great green pines – one like the other – stand out in the mid-April sun. Nothing yet bothers their furry, immobile heads, which are silhouetted sharply against this background of light, as if petrified in time, always unvarying as it passes by them.]

The unique impression that emerges from this scene is governed by the visual moment and the viewpoint. Caught on the cusp between seasons – no longer winter; not yet ‘le vrai printemps’ – nature appears in a state of flux; indeed, it hovers between states of matter, as the waters and the sun threaten to vaporize what little solidity remains of the ice that once constituted the scene’s architecture (‘la salle de glace’). The lake itself, activated by personification (‘libéré,’ ‘riait,’ ‘joie’), displays a variety of blues, which combine to form an overall hue rendered in the singular and as a noun, which is then modified by a hint of tone and texture (‘bleues, d’un bleu d’acier’). Only at this particular point of the season can we see (‘laissent voir’) certain lines and colours (‘des lignes et des couleurs’) that will soon be covered by the foliage, but they are also visible because of the elevated vantage point. By looking down on the scene (‘au fond duquel palpite le lac’), space is flattened and comes to constitute a homogeneous mass, against which salient features stand out. An initial impression is rendered by a metaphor borrowed from the visual arts, whose singular form (‘le tapis’) brings together the various remains littering the ground (‘les dépouilles de l’autre saison’). This still vague expression is then rectified by a second metaphor, also borrowed from the arts and expressed in the singular (‘la souple marqueterie’) followed by the literal term, here specifically identified (‘des feuilles mortes’). This terrestrial background then forms a single mass of shades of brown (‘sur ce fond brun, si délicatement nuancé’), against

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which various trees emerge, or rather their uniform effect emerges, since it is not, for example, the individual birch trees, but their overall grace (‘élan gracieux’) that stands out (‘jaillit’). Nor are the maple trees themselves highlighted, but rather the vague impression (‘quelque chose’), produced by the mass of branches (‘la multitude des rameaux’), visible only as a vaporous tint (‘cette vaporeuse teinte grise’). Once again, as with the ice crystals floating in the lake, the solidity of matter has yielded to the fluidity of the image itself. Only the pines, seen not against the land but against the light (‘sur ce fond de clarté’), assume a state of structural solidity and temporal immobility (‘comme pétrifiée dans le temps’) in this scene of ephemeral fugacity rendered in a prose that can well be characterized as highly Impressionist.7 Marie-Victorin’s ‘sketches,’ though intimately personal and Impressionist, are ultimately bound to the land itself and thus to questions of national identity, as we see in this passage from the chapter on ‘L’île aux Coudres,’ where he observes ‘la croix de l’islette’ with his friend Albert: Perçant la verdure du talus, un rocher, rongé de lichens rouges, surplombe. Nous nous y asseyons pour regarder et pour rêver. Il a neigé autour de nous, ou bien ce sont les céraistes et les graciles arabettes qui font leur humble vie de fleur dont toute l’affaire est d’adoucir les angles, de couvrir les nudités et de parfumer les vents … Au nord, la ligne brutale des Câpes Raides dessine sur le ciel pâle un monstre noir accroupi dans la mer. Par un effet de mirage, la côte sud paraît toute proche; la courbe onduleuse des collines bleues y chemine sous la solide banquise des nuages éclatants. Des groupes de points blancs que le soleil allume marquent les villages. Voici Montmagny, plus bas le Cap-Saint-Ignace, l’Islet, Saint-Jean-PortJoli, Saint-Roch-des-Aulnaies. Ils dorment les villages, les beaux villages, enivrés de lumière et de paix … Entre eux et nous, au loin, sur l’eau miroitante, tremblent les fines perches de la pêche aux marsouins; elles encerclent un espace immense … Devant nous, au ras des crans couverts de varech gluant, s’incline le vol noir des corneilles en maurade … Mais le centre du paysage est bien la croix, la vieille croix noire qui rêve dans son petit enclos, entre les pyramides sombres des épinettes … Le lieu n’a guère changé depuis les jours lointains où le père de La Brousse célébrait ici, dans l’ombre des arbres verts, le rite eucharistique. C’est le même horizon, le même cri aigu des goélands, le même flot qui chante, tout pareil, sur les crans limoneux. [85–7; Piercing the greenery of the embankment, a rock, eaten away by red lichen, overhangs the scene. We sit on it to look and dream. It has snowed around us, or else it’s the chickweed and slender

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rock cress doing the humble work of flowers, whose only purposes are softening angles, covering bareness, and perfuming the winds … To the north, the brutal line of the Câpes Raides is etched against the sky like a black monster crouching in the sea. By a mirage effect, the south shore appears very near; the undulating curve of the blue hills follows its course under the solid embankment of bright clouds. Groups of white dots lit up by the sun mark the villages. Here’s Montmagny, farther down CapSaint-Ignace, l’Islet, Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Saint-Roch-des Aulnaies. They’re sleeping, the villages, the beautiful villages, intoxicated with light and peace … Between them and us, in the distance, on the sparkling water, tremble the thin poles for porpoise fishing; they encompass an immense space … In front of us, at the level of the crannies carved into the shore and covered with sticky kelp, descends a black flight of marauding crows … But the centre of the landscape is truly the cross, the old black cross dreaming in its little enclosure, among the dark pyramids of the firs … The place has scarcely changed since the bygone days when Father La Brousse, in the shade of the green trees, celebrated the Eucharistic rite. It’s the same horizon, the same cry of the gulls, the same singing waves, still the same, above the same silt-filled crannies.]

The description begins with a precise designation of the vantage point, a lichen-covered rock set off in red against a complementary sea of greenery, and the relationship of the viewers to the surrounding space is noted repeatedly: ‘autour de nous,’ ‘entre eux et nous,’ ‘devant nous.’ At the same time, the status of vision itself is called into question from the outset, as the observers are there both to observe and to dream (‘pour regarder et pour rêver’), that is, to receive impressions and project reactions. Indeed, the impression, rendered on this sunny day by the metaphor of snow (‘il a neigé’), has the same status (‘ou bien’) and even precedes the identification of its literal inspiration, the bank of white flowers (‘ce sont les céraistes et les graciles arabettes’), which erases sharp forms and angles (‘adoucir les angles’) in favour of an overall image dominated by colour and light. To the north, the harsh line of the shore seems drawn (‘dessine’) against the sky, but takes the metaphorical form of a sea monster, while a visual mirage causes the south bank to appear closer than in reality. Yet another visual paradox causes the distant hills to assume a bluish colouring and appear to roll (‘la courbe onduleuse des collines bleues’), while the bank of clouds above, bursting with light, seems far more solid (‘la solide banquise des nuages éclatants’). The very sentence structure mirrors the visual act, as

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an effect of white dots (‘points blancs’), lit up by the sun (‘que le soleil allume’), marks the places occupied by various villages (‘les villages’). A pure impression might stop here, but the identity of the various villages is given in the following sentence, as memory intervenes to supplement perception, and the personified description of the villages as ‘enivrés de lumière et de paix’ seems less an observation about reality (‘regarder’) than a projection on the part of the observers (‘rêver’). Water shimmers, and poles, mere slashes of line, tremble in the hands of invisible fishermen (‘tremblent les fines perches de la pêche’) – the order of the elements again foregrounding the visual effect rather than its absent cause. Out of this immense space (‘espace immense’) dominated by effects of light, the viewers then perceive before and below them (‘devant nous’) amorphous masses of sticky kelp (‘varech gluant’) until they finally focus on a specific place at the centre of the landscape (‘le centre du paysage’) and on the object occupying it (‘la croix’). This cultural artefact then restores structure and solidity (‘entre les pyramides sombres des épinettes’) to the scene, and though it appears to dream to the dreaming viewers, this is a dream based on the past, as the place serves to recollect and memorialize the priest who had once preached there. Indeed, the landscape itself, which began as a pure impression of vast space, then focused on a precise place, which constitutes a spatial centre and a temporal lieu de mémoire, performs its own ritual by resurrecting the past, and with it an essential aspect of French-Canadian identity, in this case religion. The subsequent sketch from the chapter on ‘L’île aux Coudres,’ entitled ‘Le couchant,’ also begins in Impressionist fashion: ‘À ce moment le paysage tout entier s’abandonne à la lumière horizontale, au silence et à l’espace. Le ciel est d’un bleu tendre, d’un bleu transparent, d’un bleu de rien qui veut se faire pardonner d’être encore bleu quand tout se dore à la caresse du soleil.’ (At that moment the landscape gives itself over entirely to the horizontal light, to silence, and to space. The sky is of tender blue, a transparent blue, an insignificant blue that wants to be pardoned for still being blue when everything else is gilded by the sun’s caress.) Here the landscape itself is personified (‘s’abandonne’) as it yields to the light of the setting sun, which creates a vast and uniform space (‘espace’), in which the sky is filled with varying effects of blue colour, rendered as a noun (‘un bleu’), again personified (‘veut se faire pardonner’) and set against the uniform land (‘tout’), which the sun encrusts in its complementary colour, gold (‘se dore’). Here objects themselves have disappeared before the dominant effects of light,

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colour, and space – or, rather, the overall impression they produce in the viewer. As Marie-Victorin scans the landscape in the following paragraphs (‘mes yeux les quittent,’ ‘tire mes yeux’), however, he finds a focal point in the island’s church: Cette église de l’île aux Coudres n’a rien de très remarquable en ellemême, mais, vue de loin et encadrée dans le paysage, elle prend un rôle, une signification qui émeut. Elle est menue, proprette, compacte, taillée dans le caillou des champs, et ses deux clochers carrés regardent, pardessus l’eau noire, les Câpes Raides et le hérissement sans fin de la forêt. Entre les deux tours, le bon roi Loys, patron de la paroisse, règne sur cette terre incroyablement française malgré les invasions, la défaite, l’allégeance, et le drapeau d’Angleterre. [91–2; This church on the île aux Coudres has nothing remarkable in itself, but, seen from afar, framed by the landscape, it acquires a role, a significance that is moving. It is slight, neat, compact, sculpted into the stone-like fields, and its two square steeples look out, over the black water, at the Câpes Raides and the endless bristling of the forest. Between its twin towers, good king Louis, patron of the parish, reigns over this land that remains incredibly French, despite the invasions, the defeat, the allegiance, and the British flag.]

The first sentence mirrors the previous description of the cross and, moreover, captures the very essence of Quebec landscape art: the insertion of a specific cultural place (‘cette église’) at a central point (‘encadrée) in a vast natural space (‘dans le paysage’) seen from a relative distance (‘vue de loin’). It is the combination of the contrasting elements, or rather the double perspective entertained by the viewer, that lends the scene its meaning (‘elle prend un rôle, une signification’) and thus impact (‘qui émeut’). And that meaning is one of order (‘elle est menue, proprette, compacte’), which culture wrests from nature (‘taillée dans le caillou des champs’) as the church continues to stand solid and erect (‘ses deux clochers carrés’) before the threats of both nature (‘pardessus l’eau noire, les Câpes Raides et le hérissement sans fin de la forêt’) and other cultures (‘malgré les invasions, la défaite, l’allégeance, et le drapeau d’Angleterre’), a symbol of French heritage inherent in the surrounding land itself (‘cette terre incroyablement française’). Throughout the Croquis Marie-Victorin’s overt patriotism manifests itself in adverse feelings about the English, especially in their treatment of the Acadians from the time of the ‘grand dérangement’ (see chapter four, note nine) to the present, as in the following passage: ‘Oui! petites

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Acadiennes, pardonnez, mais souvenez-vous! … Ne baissez pas votre tête brune, ni vos beaux yeux purs, devant les touristes anglo-saxons qui, parfois, promènent leur ennui sur vos îles, non, jamais! Ils tiennent en ce moment de l’histoire la terre et la mer. Oui! … Ils ont presque toute la puissance et presque tout l’argent. Oui encore! … Mais aussi vrai qu’il y a un Dieu au ciel, ils ont du sang sur les mains, et vous avez une palme dans les vôtres … De sorte qu’en véritable et minime justice, étant, eux, les fils de bourreaux, et vous, les filles de martyrs, c’est à eux, sans doute, de courber la tête!’ (173; Yes, Acadian women, forgive but remember! Don’t lower your brunette heads, or your beautiful, pure eyes, before the Anglo-Saxon tourists who, sometimes, parade their boredom around your islands, no, never! At this moment in history they hold the land and the sea. Yes! … They have almost all the power and almost all the money. Yes again! But as sure as there is a God in heaven, they have blood on their hands, and you have a palm in yours … So that in true and minimal justice, they being the sons of executioners and you the daughters of martyrs, it is they, no doubt, who should bow their heads!) With its accusations of ‘Ils ont presque toute la puissance et presque tout l’argent’ and its call to ‘souvenez-vous’ the passage marks a strikingly direct parallel with the famous episode of the ‘voices’ in Maria Chapdelaine (chapter six) and a prefiguration of Quebec’s current motto (‘je me souviens’). If the Quebecois have fared better than the Acadians, it is, according to Marie-Victorin, because they have kept their land and developed a national literature and a national painting: ‘nous autres, Canadiens français – protégés cependant par des traités et des capitulations généreuses – , avons assuré notre pain sans le mendier à la porte du vainqueur, défendu la langue des ancêtres dans la chaumière et dans l’école, préservé notre âme française et catholique, bâti de nos mains notre système d’enseignement, développé une littérature et un art nationaux.’ (148; we others, French Canadians – protected just the same by generous treaties and terms – have earned our bread without begging at the victor’s door, have defended the language of our ancestors at home and in school, have preserved our French, catholic soul, built our educational system with our own hands, developed a national literature and art.) The sketches of Frère Marie-Victorin themselves take their place within the nation’s literature and art by depicting nature from the perspective of Impressionism, using effects of light, colour, and atmosphere, as well as culture from the perspectives of history and science, in order to foreground aspects of Quebec’s identity. They are a unique combination of fluidity and solidity, reception and projection,

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vision and memory, space and place, as are the paintings of several Quebec painters often linked to French Impressionism. Impressionism in Quebec Painting Among the many Quebec painters who have come to be labelled to one degree or another ‘Impressionists,’ the best known are Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Maurice Cullen, James Wilson Morrice, and Clarence Gagnon.8 All of these painters, who studied in France around the turn of the century, can be said to combine nature and culture or, rather, to see nature through the lens of culture, defined as art itself. As Laurier Lacroix concludes of the painters of the first quarter of the twentieth century, ‘following the example of the painters of the Barbizon school and the Impressionists, landscape artists viewed atmospheric, climatic, seasonal and meteorological phenomena as opportunities for a fresh look at the world. They enriched the perceptions of the transitions of the sun and its relationships with clouds by varying the play of light and colour on the forms of nature’ (Suzor-Coté: Light, 108).9 His list of their artistic properties and central themes could well be a description of Marie-Victorin’s writings. That Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté was preoccupied by questions of personal identity is hardly disputable: he modified his given name (Côté) to remove the circumflex and included his mother’s maiden name (Suzor) and his maternal grandmother’s maiden name (Defoy) in order to emphasize his French heritage. That he was interested in issues of national identity is also readily evident from his historical paintings of Cartier, Champlain, and Cadieux (chapter two). Following his foray into historical subjects, around 1909 Suzor-Coté turns more towards landscape art, but with the same quest for pursuing and defining the national identity, through North-American nature (Lacroix, 163). There are, of course, few things more Canadian than winter (chapter ten), and also the winter snow gave ample opportunity for further exploration of light and expansion of technique. A major compositional feature in Suzor-Coté’s winterscapes is that of a river cutting a diagonal swath through the canvas,10 since the water enabled him not only to suggest the passage of time but also to experiment with the passage between states of matter. Much as Marie-Victorin explored the changes in atmosphere, light, and colour brought on by the passing seasons, and particularly the intermediate states of matter induced by the April thaw, Suzor-Coté also returned to the same motif at different moments, here with the Nicolet River in Après-midi d’avril,

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1920 (plate 6). Seen from a relatively near and slightly elevated perspective that narrows the scope of the scene, this painting also reduces the overt presence of ‘culture’ to a bare minimum in the form of two buildings scarcely visible beyond the wall of vertical trees, painted again in varied strokes and colours, which closes the composition and compacts the space. The diagonal swath of the river is a constant, but it is rendered highly complex here by the counter diagonal lines of the shadows cast by the trees, which form a structural grid matching that of the diagonal forms of protruding land and snow on the left bank. Pierre Landry provides a fitting conclusion to our discussion of this painting and of Suzor-Coté’s particularly Canadian brand of Impressionism: En avril, le chaud soleil printanier commence à faire fondre la neige. Ici l’eau de la petite rivière monte et macule de vert la glace qui la recouvre encore. Un remous menace d’en percer la surface de sa masse sombre. Des ombres légères s’étirent et viennent zébrer la surface gelée de leurs traînées bleutées. Sur les berges, la lumière chaude colore la neige de roses et de jaunes, la terre et la végétation séchée percent les blancs rosés de leurs tons mauves et ocres. Suzor-Coté applique la couleur sans la mélanger, en empâtements épais qu’il superpose tout en laissant paraître les couches sousjacentes. D’une palette limitée, il tire ainsi de chatoyants effets de lumière, une lumière qu’il fait vibrer comme seuls les impressionnistes ont su le faire. Suzor-Coté est l’homme de sa génération, moderne et nostalgique. Il embrasse les innovations d’artistes qui, avant lui, ont ouvert de nouvelles voies, il vit au rythme trépidant d’une société qui se modernise en même temps qu’elle déplore la disparition de ses vieilles coutumes. [96; In April, the hot spring sun begins to melt the snow. Here the water in the small river rises and stains the ice still covering it in green. An eddy threatens to pierce the surface of the dark mass. Light shadows stretch out and streak the frozen surface with bluish lines. On the banks, the warm light colours the snow in pinks and yellows, the land and dried out vegetation pierce the pinkish whites with their mauve and ochre tones. Suzor-Coté applies his colours without mixing them in thick impasto that he superimposes while allowing the under layers to remain visible. With a limited palette, he thus obtains shimmering effects of light that he can cause to vibrate as only the Impressionists could. Suzor-Coté is a man of his generation, modern and nostalgic. He embraces the innovations of artists, who, before him, opened new paths; he feels the pulsating rhythm of a society becoming modern at the same time it deplores the disappearance of its old customs.]

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The description of the landscape in the first half of this passage would be hard to distinguish from Marie-Victorin’s prose; indeed, the portrait of the painter, ‘moderne et nostalgique’ would be hard to distinguish from that of Marie-Victorin himself or, for that matter, from that of other painters of the same transitional generation, to whom we now turn. Michel Nadeau sees the motif of the spring thaw as typical of FrenchCanadian painting in the early decades of the twentieth century: ‘Ils voyaient dans ce thème une allégorie du temps: sa fuite, symbolisée par l’eau qui, en coulant, s’oppose à l’immobilité de la neige, marque le passage du temps. Plusieurs artistes québécois se sont intéressés à ce sujet, mais Suzor-Coté et Maurice Cullen furent les premiers à l’exploiter.’ (27; They saw in this theme an allegory of time: its flight, symbolized by the water, which in its flow contrasted with the snow’s immobility and marked the passage of time. Several Quebecois painters were interested in this subject, but Suzor-Coté and Cullen were the first to make full use of it.) While one might question Nadeau’s suggestion of ‘Symbolism’ instead of ‘Impressionism,’ his linking of the theme to a general preoccupation with change and complexity is telling and his introduction of Maurice Cullen timely. Cullen’s Près des Éboulements, 1928 (figure 5.1), serves as an apt example of his fascination with the transformations of light and colour brought to the landscape by the change of seasons and the passage of time, exemplified in the flow of the Saint Lawrence River juxtaposed with the immobility of the snow: Although the theme is similar to that of the preceding Suzor-Coté painting, Cullen’s broader scale and composition in horizontal bands, setting the farm in the foreground against the vast expanses of the Saint Lawrence River in the mid ground and the mountain range and sky in the far ground, is far more typical of the later landscape art of Quebec. We assume an elevated viewpoint looking down on a centrally positioned farm that itself overlooks a village on the north shore of the river, which is beginning to cast off its icy carapace, imparting to the now flowing waters a bluish tint, picked up in the translucent shadows. The direction of the shadows suggests a morning sun, which is confirmed by the light illuminating the clouds and thus bringing them forward towards the frontal plane of the canvas, while lending the entire scene a general sense of tonal harmony that unifies the painting. While his attention to atmosphere, colour, and light clearly reveals the influence of the Impressionist works Cullen had encountered during his stays in France, his broader swathes of colour and paint, his adherence to architecture, both in the buildings he includes and in the composition of

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5.1 Maurice Cullen, Près des Éboulements, 1928. Pastel sur papier, 40,3 x 50,8 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1940.78. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac / Near the Éboulements, 1928. Pastel on paper, 40.3 x 50.8 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1940.78. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac.

three-dimensional space he constructs so solidly, distinguish him from his French ancestors, as Sylvia Antoniou contends: ‘S’écartant des principes de l’impressionnisme, Cullen emploie une palette claire mais sa touche n’est pas divisioniste … Son coup de pinceau est plus large aussi les formes ne s’évanouissent pas dans la lumière et la couleur.’ (62; Moving away from the principles of Impressionism, Cullen uses a light palette, but his brushwork is not divisionist … His strokes are broader and thus his shapes don’t vanish into light and colour.) And while he

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does not use the diversified strokes and colours of Suzor-Coté, he does display the same use of heavily textured paint, as his stepson Robert Pilot, himself a landscape painter of considerable note, explains: ‘Though he did not follow the divisionist technique of the impressionists, he strove while mixing a tone on the palette to keep the colours as separate as possible, so that liveliness and vibrancy would be achieved. Moreover, he regarded quality in oil painting as something involving solidity, and thus he built up his canvasses with impasto. He remarked that the surface of a picture should be a unity, throughout handled thickly, or the reverse’ (‘Maurice Cullen,’ 13).11 Robert Bernier sees such technical distinctions precisely as a matter of Cullen’s commitment to representing the specificity of French Canada: ‘La grande force de Cullen est d’avoir su adapter l’impressionnisme à la réalité d’ici. Il ajoute une dimension personnelle au traitement du paysage canadien … La touche, l’atmosphère et le rythme de sa peinture font de lui l’un des premiers peintres à créer un art représentatif de notre identité.’ (Un siècle, 30–1; The great strength of Cullen is to have known how to adapt Impressionism to reality here. He adds a personal dimension to the treatment of the Canadian landscape … The brushwork, atmosphere, and rhythm of his painting make him one of the first painters to create an art representative of our identity.) Similarly, the style of James Wilson Maurice, although he studied and for the most part resided in France, must, according to Lucie Dorais, be distinguished from that of the Impressionists: ‘On ne peut cependant qualifier de véritablement impressionnistes ces toiles inondées de lumière, puisque ni Cullen ni Morrice n’ont recours à la touche divisée.’ (253–4; One can’t nonetheless define as truly Impressionist these lightfilled canvases, since neither Cullen nor Morrice depended on divided brushwork.) Although Morrice is to some degree an expatriate, his later work is at once so typical of the territory yet so unique in its rendering as to be included here, in the form of his Maison de ferme québécoise, circa 1921 (figure 5.2). The vertical orientation of the canvas compresses space at the same time that the elevated viewpoint flattens it and the massive wall of the farmhouse in the foreground emphasizes it; all three factors cause the spectator to focus on the frontal plane of the painting, as does the wall of bold blue with visible vertical brushwork that constitutes the sky at the top of the canvas. The surprising composition is typical of Morrice’s work, which always displays a sense of architectural solidity and simplicity, as noted by Nicole Cloutier: ‘Autre composante importante des

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5.2 James Wilson Morrice, Maison de ferme québécoise, vers 1921. Huile sur toile, 81,2 x 60,3 cm. Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, 1943.787, legs William J. Morrice. Photo: MBAM, Christine Guest / Quebec Farmhouse, circa 1921. Oil on canvas, 81.2 x 60.3 cm. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1943.787, William J. Morrice Bequest. Photo: MMFA, Christine Guest.

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oeuvres de Morrice: l’architecture … Des immeubles sont souvent coupés en deux pour fermer la composition comme dans … Maison de ferme québécoise. Les bâtiments sont presque toujours placés parallèlement au plan de la toile, rompant ainsi avec les théories de la perspective; il n’y a donc presque jamais de point de fuite.’ (75; Another important component of Morrice’s works is architecture … The buildings are often cut in two to close the composition, as in Maison de ferme québécoise. The buildings are almost always placed parallel to the plane of the canvas, thereby breaking with theories of perspective; there is thus almost never a vanishing point.) The omnipresent wall, parallel and proximate to the frontal plane, also displays clear evidence of Morrice’s brushwork and serves to set off the web of graceful arabesques formed by the ice-incrusted branches of the tree and continued by the curves of the roof and the fence. According to G. Blair Laing, ‘in a style reminiscent of art nouveau the bare branches of a tree emerge from the right foreground, creating a strong pattern against the grey walls of the farmhouse’ (30). The house is also inserted into a mass of snow, seen at twilight, which is less compelling for its reflection of light or its heavy texture than for the subtle variations of colour that Morrice imparts to it, a symphony of yellow, grey, and white, among the less striking hues of the spectrum, which are picked up in different degrees of dominance in the wall of the farmhouse. The pink of the sleigh, contrasting at once with the blue of the sky, the grey of the wall, and the yellowish white of the snow, but suggested in the tints of the house window, provides a visual entry point into the painting, yet the sleigh seems to be going nowhere, immobilized by the snow, travelling uphill due to the elevated viewpoint, and heading towards a barrier of buildings and trees in the distance. Time seems as frozen as the landscape, both captured by the masses of colour and matrix of lines that foreground (literally) the virtuoso performance of the artist, who has imposed his unique vision on this typical Quebec scene. The ultimate space of this painting is, as Esther Trépanier contends, that of the canvas itself (17). As removed from Quebec as was Morrice, Clarence Gagnon was just as attached to his terroir, specifically to Charlevoix, on the north bank of the Saint Lawrence River.12 And, while the art of Morrice is idiosyncratic, Gagnon’s painting is highly typical of the Quebec tradition of landscape art, hardly surprising for a student of Brymner (in Montreal), a disciple of Walker (on the île d’Orléans), a friend of Morrice (in Paris), and a mentor of René Richard (in Baie-Saint-Paul). Gagnon’s La Croix de

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chemin en hiver, 1916 (figure 5.3), exemplifies the mixture of styles and themes, especially winter, that such a list of acquaintances and places might suggest.13 The spectator is immediately struck, of course, by the radical juxtaposition of the foreground – representing the cultural place of the cross and scattered farm buildings on the Cap-aux-Corbeaux, some 500 feet above the valley – and the middle ground, depicting the village of BaieSaint-Paul surrounded by mountains, which meld into the sky in the far ground. We are not far, geographically and thematically, from MarieVictorin’s designation of the central place occupied by the cross in his description of the île-aux-Coudres, just across the river. In Gagnon’s painting, the topographical separation is enhanced by the horizontal composition of the far ground, cut by the vertical thrust of the cross in the near ground. The two planes are further differentiated by the use of shadow in the foreground – which enables Gagnon to explore a range of cold tones, especially blues – and sunlight in the middle and far grounds, which creates an array of warmer hues running from white, through yellow, to orange; the latter, as the complementary colour of blue, fosters a shimmering effect by juxtaposition with it, an effect termed ‘Impressionist’ by several critics.14 More typical of Gagnon’s definitive style than Impressionism, however, is the solid depiction of the foreground, with the rectilinear forms of the cross and buildings contrasting both with the winding curves of the road and rickety fence and with the diagonal lines of the arms of the cross and the slope of the terrain. Moreover, in this part of the painting Gagnon favours an opposition of distinct colours, such as the reds in the sleigh and buildings set against the complementary dark green of the shutters and trees, in contrast with the pastel-like unity of the far ground. May we not hypothesize that, while the Impressionist style was well-suited for suggesting the shimmering snows of winter and the blazing hues of autumn, Gagnon found it just too ephemeral to capture the solidity of the French-Canadian farmhouse and cross, and thus of the people they stand for. In his later paintings (chapter six), Gagnon’s colours become more intense and his use of lines more prominent, causing him to abandon his Impressionist side, as Hélène Sicotte notes: ‘Sa prédilection pour le dessin et les formes décoratives l’incitera à délaisser les effets d’atmosphère et les jeux de lumière au profit d’une peinture d’aspect plus lisse et bidimensionnelle.’ (124; His predilection for drawing and decorative forms will incite him to abandon atmospheric effects

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5.3 Clarence Alphonse Gagnon, Wayside Cross, Winter, 1916. Oil on canvas, 70.8 x 91.7 cm. ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO. Art Gallery of Ontario, The Thompson Collection © 2010 Art Gallery of Ontario / La croix de chemin en hiver, 1916. Huile sur toile, 70,8 x 91,7 cm. Galerie d’art de l’Ontario, Collection Thompson © Art Gallery of Ontario.

and  the play of light in favour of painting in a smoother and twodimensional way.) In short, for Gagnon, as for Suzor-Coté, Cullen, and Morrice, Impressionism, however powerful a tool, proves to be more a means than an end: that end being nationalism, through the specificity of the French-Canadian landscape. And that specificity is constituted precisely by the combination of nature and culture that forms the focus of this book, as Sicotte concludes of Gagnon’s paintings: ‘Sa quête de beauté épouse son idéal d’un rapport harmonique entre la nature sauvage et un certain état de culture.’ (116; His quest

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for beauty espouses the ideal of a harmonic relationship between the wilderness and a certain state of culture.) Sicotte’s identification of a ‘nouvelle dynamique de recherche et d’exploration identitaires qui se développe au Canada durant le premier tiers du XXe siècle’ (29; new dynamic of identitary quest and exploration that develops in Canada in the first third of the twentieth century) not only raises the allied issue of national identity but also moves it to a broader, pan-Canadian level.15 On that same level, in the preface to a catalogue combining an exhibition of Quebec artists from the early twentieth century and the Ontariobased Group of Seven, John Porter concludes as follows: ‘L’observateur attentif aura tôt fait d’opposer les larges horizons nordiques du Groupe des Sept à la vision plus intimiste de la nature qui caractérise la plupart des peintres du Québec. Fort contraste également entre le territoire vierge et les grands espaces inhabités des artistes ontariens, d’une part, et les villes, villages et territoires apprivoisés de leurs voisins, d’autre part.’ (The attentive observer will have soon contrasted the broad Nordic horizons of the Group of Seven with the more intimate vision of nature that characterizes most of Quebec’s painters. A sharp contrast also between the virgin territory and vast spaces of the Ontarian artists, on the one hand, and the cities, villages, and territories tamed by their neighbours, on the other hand.)16 To nuance this broad distinction somewhat, it might be more accurate to say that the Group of Seven tends towards nature, and the Quebec artists towards culture, or rather, as I contend, towards the combination of nature and culture that has characterized all four of the painters we have been examining in relation to the written sketches of Marie-Victorin. Two of these painters, Suzor-Coté and Gagnon, reappear in the following chapter, since both did illustrations for the same novel, itself an exploration of French-Canadian identity: Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine.

Chapter Six

Space, Place, and a Race That Will Not Die

The ongoing presence of the French heritage in Quebec is confirmed by the trajectory of Louis Hémon, which complements yet reverses that of the Quebec painters we just examined who studied in France: Hémon was born in France and emigrated to Quebec, where he lived a mere two years before his death in 1913. His depiction of Quebec, his elected country, through the lens of French culture was so successful, however, that his novel, Maria Chapdelaine: Récit du Canada français – published posthumously in serial form in France in 1914, then as a volume in Montreal in 1916 – has become among the most important monuments of Quebec literature, cited reverently by even those of the purest ‘laine’ (‘stock’), including the painters Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, who illustrated the 1916 edition, Clarence Gagnon, who undertook an edition with colour illustrations in 1933, and Jean Paul Lemieux, who illustrated certain passages in a retrospective appreciation of the work, published in 1981.1 Such was the impact and influence of this novel – ‘En France, Maria Chapdelaine constitue un best-seller; au Québec, il devient un mythe’ (Biron, Dumont, and Nardout-Lafarge, 199; In France, Maria Chapdelaine constitutes a bestseller; in Quebec, it becomes a myth) – that Félix-Antoine Savard quotes it extensively in Menaud, maître-draveur (1937), itself illustrated by René Richard in 1979. Maria Chapdelaine Set in the countryside, Maria Chapdelaine continues, even epitomizes, the tradition of the rural novel examined in chapters three and four. The Chapdelaine family farm occupies new land that still requires défrichement, the struggle of agriculture against nature, as in Jean Rivard,

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and as in Charles Guérin, the characters embody a full set of paradigmatic alternatives, each representing a different space and accompanying personality type, here in the personages of Maria’s three suitors: the adventuresome François Paradis, her true love, a coureur de bois who lives in the northern wilderness; the successful Lorenzo Surprenant, who has left rural Quebec to seek his fortune in the big city (in the States no less!); and the faithful Eutrope Gagnon, a nearby farmer devoted to Maria, her family, and the land at hand (see also Chapman, Siting, 40). Set in 1908–9 (see Boivin, ‘Présentation,’ 9), the action of the novel is situated in and around the village of Péribonka near Lake Saint-Jean, to the northwest and at some distance from the fertile, civilized, and highly populated Saint Lawrence valley. Quebec was, at that time, in a transitional period, moving away from agriculture towards industrialization.2 Although the Lake Saint-Jean region was itself already highly ‘colonized’ into farmland at the outset of the century and was beginning to see the development of industry, especially wood-pulp production,3 it is hardly surprising that Hémon, who had firsthand knowledge of both aspects of the local economy, would focus on agricultural colonization, more removed from the European experience, more ‘picturesque,’ and more faithful to a literary tradition already present in Charles Guérin and brought to the fore in Jean Rivard. Maria Chapdelaine cannot, however, be reduced to a mere ‘roman de la terre’ or even a ‘roman du territoire,’ as several critics, to whom we shall return, have shown. The novel begins with the unattributed (though clearly clerical) pronouncement in Latin that ‘the mass is ended,’ emphasizing the importance of the Roman Catholic religion for the rural community of Péribonka, from whose curé and church the phrase emanates. The remainder of the first paragraph is a description divided between the village, its surrounding landscape, and its inhabitants, thus implying and reinforcing the intimate link between ‘place,’ ‘space,’ and ‘race’: ‘Ite missa est.’ La porte de l’église de Péribonka s’ouvrit et les hommes commencèrent à sortir. Un instant plus tôt elle parut désolée, cette église juchée au bord du chemin sur la berge haute au-dessus de la rivière Péribonka, dont la nappe glacée et couverte de neige gisait épaisse sur le chemin aussi, et sur les champs, car le soleil d’avril n’envoyait entre les nuages gris que quelques rayons sans chaleur et les grandes pluies de printemps n’étaient pas encore venues. Toute cette blancheur froide, la petitesse de l’église de bois et des quelques maisons, de bois également,

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espacées le long du chemin, la lisière sombre de la forêt, si proche qu’elle semblait une menace, tout parlait d’une vie dure dans un pays austère. Mais voici que les hommes et les jeunes gens franchirent la porte de l’église, s’assemblèrent en groupes sur le large perron, et les salutations joviales, les appels moqueurs lancés d’un groupe à l’autre, l’entrecroisement constant des propos sérieux ou gais témoignèrent de suite que ces hommes appartenaient à une race pétrie d’invincible allégresse et que rien ne peut empêcher de rire. [19; ‘Ite missa est.’ The door of the Péribonka church opened, and the men began to come out. An instant earlier it appeared desolate, this church perched on the high bank above the Péribonka River, whose sheet of ice covered in snow also lay thick on the road and on the fields, since the April sun was sending through the grey clouds but a few unwarm rays, and the big spring rains hadn’t yet come. All this cold whiteness, the small size of the wooden church and the few houses, wooden as well, scattered along the road, the dark edge of the forest, so close that it seemed threatening; everything bespoke a harsh existence in a stern land. But then the men and the young people crossed the church threshold, assembled in groups in the large entranceway, and the jovial greetings, the mocking shouts cast from one group to another, the constant combination of serious and frivilous comments quickly attested that these men belonged to a race moulded of invincible elation, which nothing could keep from laughter.]

After the direct quote, the description begins with a precise visual effect, the church door opening, as if seen from the outside, but from fairly nearby. The third sentence, however, represents both a regression in time (‘un instant plus tôt’) and a step back in space for a perspective that commands a more panoramic view from the other side of the river, one that can present at once the church, its surroundings, and its parishioners. The description is highly visual in its attention to spatial relationships and topographical configuration: ‘cette église juchée au bord du chemin sur la berge haute au-dessus de la rivière Péribonka.’ The pervasive whiteness of the snow (‘Toute cette blancheur froide’) contrasts with the dark line of the encroaching forest (‘la lisière sombre de la forêt’), which threatens (‘menace’) the fragile places of civilization: the church and the scattered houses. The narrator then steps in to read and summarize the signs for the reader who might have missed them: ‘tout parlait d’une vie dure dans un pays austère.’ Yet, despite the austere setting, the inhabitants themselves are seen (‘témoignèrent’) as persistent, jovial, and convivial, constituting a

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group (‘race’), the implications of which seem also to imply, as does the subtitle ‘récit du Canada français,’ that the reader is of a different ethnic group, a supposition soon confirmed by the presence of the women as they would appear to an outsider: ‘Un étranger se fût étonné de les trouver presque élégantes au coeur de ce pays sauvage, si typiquement françaises parmi les grands bois désolés et la neige.’ (23; A foreigner would have been astounded to find them almost elegant in the heart of this wild land, so typically French amidst the large desolate woods and the snow.) Indeed, the entire book is seeded with expressions like ‘race’ and ‘au pays de Québec,’ whose illustration and defence the narrator readily and relentlessly undertakes, ultimately to the detriment of the continental French. In this opening passage, the cultural place of the church seems dwarfed (‘petitesse’) by the surrounding wilderness, but the religious phrase at the outset, the church’s position at the centre of the composition, and its function as a gathering place for the community, with its ‘invincible allégresse,’ serve to counterbalance the threat of the wilderness. Not surprisingly for landscape painters, Suzor-Coté, Gagnon, and Lemieux all chose to depict this highly visual opening scene in their illustrations of the novel. In 1916, Suzor-Coté did twenty-five original black and white drawings, which were reproduced in considerably reduced form in the book, including this initial one, Ite missa est (figure 6.1).4 Suzor-Coté chooses a relatively close viewpoint, like that of the final part of the novel’s initial paragraph, allowing him to concentrate on the church-goers’ activities, and in fact, eighteen of his drawings for the novel are portraits or genre scenes. Here, the stone facade of the church, rendered through a grid of intricate and ordered lines, is displayed fully by falsifying the perspective, which then serves to set off the parishioners (Lacroix, Suzor-Coté: Light, 249). The dark tone of the church is offset by the mass of snow on its roof and on the ground to the left, while the open view to the right leads the eye through the village and towards the snowy landscape and menacing sky in the background, where the vigour of Suzor-Coté’s drawing in the foreground and middle ground is matched by the ‘dramatic strokes of the background’ (Thom, 14). Thom concludes of Suzor-Coté’s set of illustrations that ‘his images suggest rather than dictate to us. Information is provided, but not so much so that our imaginations are impeded. The drawings are, in short, admirably suited to the task of illustration. They complement rather than overwhelm Hémon’s narrative’ (20).5

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6.1 Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Ite missa est (Allez, la messe est dite), illustration pour ‘Maria Chapdelaine’ de Louis Hémon, 1916. Fusain sur papier collé sur carton, 48,5 x 62,5 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1934.76, achat en 1927. Photo: Patrick Altman / Ite missa est (The Mass is over), illustration for ‘Maria Chapedelaine’ by Louis Hémon, 1916. Charcoal on paper mounted on cardboard, 48.5 x 62.5 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1934.76, purchased in 1927. Photo: Patrick Altman.

Clarence Gagnon undertook the first set of coloured illustrations for the novel in 1933, producing sixty works in a mixture of chalk, gouache, pastel, and graphite.6 For the initial scene, L’église de Péribonka (figure 6.2), Gagnon adopts a relatively distant vantage point in order to achieve a panoramic and picturesque composition, rather simplified by reduction to the horizontal bands of river, land, and sky, of near-equal weight, which serve

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6.2 Clarence Gagnon (1881–1942), L’église de Péribonka, composition de la page 1 pour ‘Maria Chapdelaine’ de Louis Hémon (Paris: Éditions Mornay, 1933). Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Photo: Patrick Altman / Church at Péribonka, composition of page 1 of ‘Maria Chapdelaine’ by Louis Hémon (Paris: Éditions Mornay, 1933). Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Photo: Patrick Altman.

to emphasize the vertical thrust of the steeple, positioned at the centre and nestled within the interlocking diagonals formed by the descending slope and fence to its left and sleigh path to its right. While the symmetrical blocks of forest are diminished and pushed to the sides, the centrally positioned houses of bright, varied colours lend the scene a warm, lively, and optimistic note,7 stressed by Silvie Bernier in her comparison of the ideologies implicit in the illustrations of Suzor-Coté and Gagnon: ‘Si la composition profonde de l’œuvre de Suzor-Côté donne l’image d’une société figée qui cherche à préserver l’état des choses, celle de Clarence Gagnon repose au contraire sur un système de valeurs qui fait du changement, de l’evolution, un principe dominant.’ (‘L’illustration,’

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89; If the underlying composition of Suzor-Coté’s work produces the image of a rigid society seeking to preserve the present state of things, Clarence Gagnon’s, to the contrary, relies on a value system that makes a dominant principle of change, of evolution.)8 Jean Paul Lemieux, however, found Suzor-Coté’s illustrations too anecdotal – ‘C’est une suite de têtes au fusain sans aucun paysage’ (5; It’s a series of charcoal heads without any landscape) – and Gagnon’s too colourful: ‘Je trouvais son oeuvre haute en couleurs, pour exprimer un pays si austère.’ (I found his work colourful for expressing such a harsh land.)9 Lemieux’s own illustrations, which comprised ten photolithographs, including this one of the initial scene, L’église de Péribonka (figure 6.3), are much more atmospheric, even ‘metaphysical’ (Boulizon, 164). Although again a combination of nature and culture, Lemieux’s painting shows the church and the parishioners dwarfed, even lost in a seemingly desolate landscape, whose immensity is underscored by the amount of snow, taking up the entire foreground, set against the indistinctly rendered background and the horizon line. Although the distant horizon line often serves to enhance the melancholy of Lemieux’s works (Carani, 244–5), its dominant presence also suggests an aura of spirituality for Guy Robert: ‘Le cosmos murmure, sur cette ligne d’horizon où tentent de se définir réciproquement le ciel et la terre, l’ailleurs et l’ici, le temps et l’espace.’ (Jean, 56; The cosmos murmurs on this horizon line where sky and earth, elsewhere and here, time and space attempt to define themselves reciprocally.)10 On the other hand, human cultural activity seems inconsequential in relation to the vast wilderness and unbrokenly hostile climate, ‘le silence et l’espace démesurés’ (Dubé, 108), for the austere Lemieux, often considered, nonetheless, as one of Quebec’s most representative painters.11 This seeming paradox is, according to Dennis Reid’s assessment of Lemieux’s paintings, at the very heart of the French-Canadian identity: ‘Moody, simplified studies of strong sentiment, they confront the solitude the Québécois has traditionally felt in his struggle with a harsh climate and an isolating social environment. By implication they celebrate “la survivance” of the basic values of the true Quebec’ (A Concise History, 289).12 In comparing the three artists’ renditions of the opening scene, I find that Gagnon strikes a balance between the emphasis on human activity in Suzor-Coté and the desolation of the landscape for Lemieux, a balance I also find true of (and to) Hémon’s text. In this regard I would concur with Patricia Demers’s contention, derived from her analysis of the first chapter, that ‘the much commented on allusions to gloom, dep-

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6.3 Jean Paul Lemieux, L’église de Péribonka, du livre illustré ‘Jean Paul Lemieux retrouve Maria Chapdelaine,’ 1981. Photolithographie, 2522 / 5000, 30,6 x 45,8 cm (papier); 28,1 x 34,8 cm (image). Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1989.295.09, legs Marcel Carbotte. Photo: Idra Labrie. © Gestion A.S.L. INC. / Péribonka Church, from the artist book ‘Jean Paul Lemieux retrouve Maria Chapdelaine,’ 1981. Photolithograph, 2522 / 5000, 30.6 x 45.8 cm (paper); 28.1 x 34.8 cm (image). Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1989.295.09, Marcel Carbotte Bequest. Photo: Idra Labrie. Gestion A.S.L. INC.

rivation, and threat are usually followed by equally frequent mentions of cheer, animation, and courage. With real but understated adroitness, Hémon ushers us into this world of contrasts and conventions, cueing us at the same time about how to read and interpret his tightly woven account’ (31). After introducing his main characters – Samuel Chapdelaine, a farmer whose land is quite far from the village, his robustfully beautiful daughter, Maria, and the dashing François Paradis, whom they

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have encountered after several years’ absence – the narrator returns to the same landscape: Les aunes formaient un long buisson épais le long de la rivière Péribonka; mais leurs branches dénudées ne cachaient pas la chute abrupte de la berge, ni la vaste plaine d’eau glacée, ni la lisière sombre du bois qui serrait de près l’autre rive, ne laissant entre la désolation touffue des grands arbres droits et la désolation nue de l’eau figée que quelques champs étroits, souvent encore semés de souches, si étroits en vérité qu’ils semblaient étranglés sous la poigne du pays sauvage. Pour Maria, qui regardait toutes ces choses distraitement, il n’y avait rien là de désolant ni de redoutable. Elle n’avait jamais connu que des aspects comme ceux-là d’octobre à mai, ou bien d’autres plus frustes encore et plus tristes, plus éloignés des maisons et des cultures; et même tout ce qui l’entourait ce matin-là lui parut soudain adouci, illuminé par un réconfort, par quelque chose de précieux et de bon qu’elle pouvait maintenant attendre. Le printemps arrivait peut-être … ou bien encore l’approche d’une autre raison de joie qui venait vers elle sans laisser deviner son nom. [26–7; The alders formed a long thicket along the Péribonka river, but their naked branches did not hide the abrupt slope of the shore, the vast plain of frozen water, or the dark edge of the forest that pressed up against the other bank, leaving only, between the tufted desolation of the tall erect trees and the barren desolation of the frozen water, a few narrow fields, often still strewn with stumps, so narrow in truth that they seemed strangled by the grip of the wild land. For Maria, who looked at all these things distractedly, there was nothing disconsolate or fearful there. She had never known vistas other than ones like these, from October through May, or else others still cruder and sadder, farther from houses and fields; and even everything around her this particular morning seemed suddenly softer to her, lit up by something comforting, by something precious and good that she could now await. Springtime was arriving perhaps … or rather more the approach of another reason for joy that was coming towards her without allowing itself to be named.]

From a reverse perspective, looking from the village towards the other bank of the river, as do the characters, the narrator initially re-emphasizes the desolate nature and threat of the surrounding wilderness (‘sous la poigne du pays sauvage’); then, through Maria’s viewpoint (‘regardait’), projected onto the landscape, he uses the setting to suggest her persistent optimism and recently kindled attraction. He allows the reader

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to interpret these signs, which remain unarticulated by Maria (‘une autre raison de joie qui venait vers elle sans laisser deviner son nom’): a presupposition that the presumably French reader knows little about the landscape, even less about Quebec, but a lot about love. The father and daughter then begin the long sleigh ride home, with the surrounding countryside depicted a third time from their mobile viewpoint at frequent and regular intervals (29–34). In effect, the composition of the entire first chapter is governed by the recurrent description of the landscape, which reflects the progress of the Chapdelaines as they return home and the progressively diminishing ratio of culture in relation to the continually threatening and ever-encroaching forest: ‘Les maisons s’espaçaient, pathétiquement éloignées les unes des autres.’ (31, see also 32; The houses were spaced out, separated pathetically one from another.)13 In no other chapter is the landscape interwoven so systematically into the progression of the narrative, but in nearly every chapter a particular aspect of the landscape is highlighted and modulated according to the progression of the seasons: ‘la marche naturelle des saisons’ (60). The landscape description in turn serves as a hub around which each chapter turns, its spokes being formed by the characters, their activities, their interactions, and ultimately their values, which come to constitute the essential components of the French-Canadian identity for Hémon. Chapter two, like the first one, is set in early April and, after a description of the Chapdelaine family and household, presents the ideal landscape dreamed of by the mother, Laura: ‘Elle pensait toujours avec regret aux vieilles paroisses où la terre est défrichée et cultivée depuis longtemps, et où les maisons sont proches les unes aux autres, comme à une sorte de paradis perdu.’ (41; She still thought regretfully about the old parishes where the land had been cleared and cultivated for a long time and where the houses are near to each other, as if a sort of lost paradise.) If this paradise of pure culture (‘cultivée’) remains ‘lost,’ however, it is because, we learn, Samuel Chapdelaine is an inveterate défricheur who thrives on the struggle itself and turns to new challenges once the land is cleared: ‘Faire de la terre! C’est la forte expression du pays, qui exprime tout ce qui gît de travail terrible entre la pauvreté du bois sauvage et la fertilité finale des champs labourés et semés. Samuel Chapdelaine en parlait avec une flamme d’enthousiasme et d’entêtement dans les yeux. C’était sa passion à lui: une passion d’homme fait pour le défrichement plutôt que pour la culture.’ (42; Make land! That’s the main expression of the area, which denotes all the daunting work that

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lies between the poverty of the wild forest and the final fertility of the tilled and planted fields. Samuel Chapdelaine spoke of it with the flame of enthusiasm and stubbornness in his eyes. That was his passion: the passion of a man made for clearing rather than for cultivating.) One might say that Laura Chapdelaine’s vision of the landscape tends towards culture, just as François Paradis’s tends towards nature, while Samuel Chapdelaine mediates between nature and culture, as Jean-Claude Vernex, puts it: ‘un médiateur répondant à une mission presque divine’ (69; a mediator fulfilling a near divine mission).14 If not ‘divine,’ Samuel’s mission is certainly ‘national’ and very much in tune with the French-Canadian notion of land colonization in the late nineteenth century. Chapter three, set in May, reintroduces François Paradis and, with him, a vision of the landscape at odds with those of both Samuel Chapdelaine and his wife, one that rejoices in the wilderness itself: ‘Le vaste pays sauvage avait réveillé un atavisme lointain de vagabondage et d’aventure.’ (49; The vast wilderness had awoken a primitive urge for wandering and adventure.) Maria, while continuing to espouse her parents’ views, is fascinated by the primordial feelings of François, with whom she begins to fall in love, a feeling reciprocated, we learn, through an exchange of meaningful gazes (47; see Labonté and Moussally, 152–7). Indeed, chapter five takes the reader to early July and to an evening gathering for the fête de Sainte-Anne during which Maria grows increasingly conscious of the attentions of three potential suitors: Lorenzo Surprenant, returning on vacation from a big city in the States, whose praises he sings; Eutrope Gagnon, a neighbour devoted to farming the land; and, of course, François Paradis, also defined in terms of his space – ‘Il semblait avoir apporté avec lui quelque chose de la nature sauvage’ (75; He seemed to have brought with him something of the wilderness) – which now exerts a powerful effect on Maria: ‘Et Maria, que sa vie rendait incapable de comprendre la beauté de cette nature-là, parce qu’elle était si près d’elle, sentait pourtant qu’une magie s’était mise à l’oeuvre et lui envoyait la griserie de ses philtres dans les narines.’ (75; And Maria, whose life rendered her incapable of comprehending the beauty of that nature, because she was so close to it, felt nonetheless as if a spell had been cast and was sending the intoxication of its potions into her nostrils.) Indeed, François stays over to join the family in blueberry picking the following day, an event rendered in tandem with an ‘Impressionist’ landscape description (77–8), whose emotive connotations are evident and, no doubt, contribute to the tacit agreement at

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chapter’s end between Maria and François to wed the following spring (81), ‘a pact between wild and tame, forest and farm,’ as Warwick terms it (‘Maria,’ 40). Chapters six (July–August) and seven (September) highlight haymaking and harvest, but it is the month of October (chapter eight), a transitional month, that produces what is perhaps Hémon’s best descriptive passage and Gagnon’s best painting: Tout au long d’octobre les jours de gel et les jours de pluie alternèrent, cependant que la forêt devenait d’une beauté miraculeuse. A cinq cents pas de la maison des Chapdelaine la berge de la rivière Péribonka descendait à pic vers l’eau rapide et les blocs de pierre qui précédaient la chute, et de l’autre côté du courant la berge opposée montait comme un amphithéâtre de rocher en coteau, de coteau en colline, mais comme un amphithéâtre qui se prolongeait sans fin vers le nord. Du feuillage des bouleaux, des trembles, des aunes, des merisiers, semés sur les pentes, octobre vint faire des taches jaunes et rouges de mille nuances. Pour quelques semaines le brun de la mousse, le vert inchangeable des sapins et des cyprès ne furent plus qu’un fond et servirent seulement à faire ressortir les teintes émouvantes de cette autre végétation qui renaît avec chaque printemps et meurt avec chaque automne. La splendeur de cette agonie s’étendait sur la pente des collines comme sur une bande sans fin qui suivait l’eau, s’en allant toujours aussi belle, aussi riche de couleurs vives et tendres, aussi émouvante, vers les régions lointaines du nord où nul oeil humain ne se posait sur elle. Mais voici que du nord vint bientôt un grand vent froid qui ressemblait à une condamnation définitive, à la fin cruelle d’un sursis, et présentement, les pauvres feuilles jaunes, brunes et rouges, secouées trop durement, jonchèrent le sol; la neige les recouvrit et le sol blanchi ne connut plus comme parure que le vert immuable des arbres sombres, qui triomphèrent, pareils à des femmes emplies d’une sagesse amère, qui auraient échangé pour une vie éternelle leur droit à la beauté. [96–7; Throughout October, days of frost and rain alternated while the forest took on a miraculous beauty. Five hundred feet from the Chapdelaine house, the bank of the Péribonka River descended straight down towards the fast-moving water and blocks of stone that preceded the falls, and on the other side of the current the opposite bank rose like an amphitheatre from rock to hillside, from hillside to hilltop, but like an amphitheatre extending endlessly towards the north. From the foliage of the birches, the aspens, the alders, the cherries, scattered on the slopes, October had come to make yellow and red patches of a thousand nuances. For a few weeks,

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the brown of the moss, the unchangeable green of the firs and cypresses were no more than a backdrop and served only to bring out the moving tints of this other vegetation that is reborn each spring and dies each autumn. The splendour of these death throes stretched over the slopes of the hills like an endless band that followed the water, heading away, still as beautiful, as rich in lively or tender colours, as moving, towards the faraway regions of the north where no human eye would fall on them. But then, from the north, soon came a strong cold wind that seemed like a definitive condemnation, the cruel end to a reprieve, and presently, the poor yellow, brown, and red leaves, shaken too hard, encumbered the earth; the snow covered them and the whitened earth had no further finery than the immutable green of the dark trees, which triumphed, like women filled with bitter wisdom, who would have exchanged for eternal life their right to beauty.]

One of the few scenes where the forest is presented in terms of its beauty (‘beauté’), the description is also balanced in its centred composition and in its insistence on both line and colour. The reader follows the movement of the spectator’s eye down the left bank, to the river, and the rapids in the centre, then up the right bank, which takes on the geometrical form of an amphitheatre due to the interlocking of its progressively larger components: ‘de rocher en coteau, de coteau en colline.’ From these two dimensions, the composition then extends in depth, as the eye follows the endless progression of the hills and the river towards the north. The great variety and vivacity of the North-American landscape are emphasized by the number of different trees, seen as masses of bright colours (‘taches jaunes et rouges’), themselves highly varied (‘de mille nuances’). The mobility of the landscape is enhanced by seeing the colours change over time (‘pour quelques semaines’) and by setting them off against a background (‘fond’) formed by the moss and evergreens, whose permanent hues are rendered more prominent by the nominal form (‘le brun de la mousse, le vert inchangeable des sapins et des cyprès’). The band of colours, like the diminishing land form, leads the eye once more (‘s’en allant’) along the river towards the mysterious and inaccessible north. The passage then reverses direction as it evokes the winter wind emanating from the north and bringing with it a sense of death (‘une condamnation définitive’), witnessed no longer by the human eye, forced indoors by the rigourous climate, but only by the evergreens themselves, like so many women aware of the transcience of beauty. The description is thus marked by the passage of

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time and a sense of foreboding that will soon be fulfilled, causing Warwick to downplay its initial beauty: ‘[Hémon’s] description of autumn (ch. VII) suggests that he brought his own anguish with him. Canada’s gayest season is submerged in Baudelairean melancholy, and rapidly transformed by the first snow into a cruel dialogue.’15 The landscape of chapter nine, set in December, evokes the miraculous quality of the Christmas season during which Maria says a thousand Ave Maria’s for the safe return of François Paradis as she stares out at the ‘bois redoutables’ (111). It is, in fact, these ‘dreaded woods,’ the north woods, that kill François as he attempts to make his way back to spend the holidays with his beloved Maria. Caught in the wilderness during a snow storm, he strays (119) and gets lost, a human ‘paradise lost,’ never to be regained, a mirage representing the legendary mode of life of the coureur de bois, no longer possible in the real, contemporary world, as Chapman notes: ‘Seen from the point of view of the early twentieth century Paradis can be seen as a near-mythical figure, symbol of the coureurs des bois, and of Quebec’s pre-Conquest state, before the fall into British rule. While Maria may desire such a myth, the freedom to which Paradis aspires (in the narrative) is doomed, because already destroyed (historically speaking). From this perspective his death symbolizes a reenactment of the fall from freedom to the state of the colonisé, and Maria’s love for him suggests a desire for a lost past, which again offers no physical place of belonging for her in the present’ (Siting, 52). Their love is an illusion that cannot be obtained, ‘pareil à une grande flamme-lumière aperçue dans un pays triste’ (154, 156; like a large flaming light seen in a sad land). After two months of intense mourning, Maria is ordered by the parish priest to forget the past and devote herself to the living, an opportunity that occurs with the return of Lorenzo Surprenant in March. Lorenzo embodies another space, that of the big city, whose flamboyant lights prove tempting, but ultimately just another mirage: ‘François Paradis était venu au coeur de l’été, descendant du pays mystérieux situé “en haut des rivières”; le souvenir des très simples paroles qu’il avait prononcées était mêlé à celui du grand soleil éclatant, des bleuets mûrs, des dernières fleurs de bois de charme se fanant dans la brousse. Après lui Lorenzo Surprenant avait apporté un autre mirage: le mirage des belles cités lointaines et de la vie qu’il offrait, riche de merveilles inconnues.’ (149; François Paradis had come in the heart of summer, down from the mysterious land located ‘above the rivers’; and the memory of the very simple words he had spoken was mixed with that

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of the big, bright sun, the ripe blueberries, the last charming wild flowers fading in the brush. After him Lorenzo Surprenant had brought another mirage: the mirage of beautiful faraway cities and the life it offered, rich in unknown marvels.) Later in March, Maria receives one more declaration, from the neighbour Eutrope Gagnon, who represents yet another space, that of the present rural environment, which he invokes in his proposal: ‘Vous savez bien que j’ai de l’amitié pour vous Maria. Je ne vous en avais pas parlé encore, d’abord parce que ma terre n’était pas assez avancée pour que nous puissions vivre dessus comme il faut tous les deux … et vous savez que c’est de la bonne terre … Et pendant l’été, avant les foins, et puis entre les foins et la moission, ça serait le bon temps pour élever une belle petite maison chaude et solide.’ (150; You well know that I have a liking for you Maria. I hadn’t spoken to you about it before, first because my land wasn’t far enough along that we could live there properly the two of us … and you know it’s good land … And during the summer, before haymaking and harvest, it would be a good time to build a beautiful little house, warm and solid.) Gagnon, unlike the other suitors, invokes a living place (‘petite maison’), but Maria continues to focus on the surrounding space, which she has come to dread: ‘Toujours le bois, impénétrable, hostile, plein de secrets sinistres, fermé autour d’eux comme une poigne cruelle qu’il faudrait desserrer peu à peu, année par année.’ (151; Always the woods, impenetrable, hostile, full of sinister secrets, closed around them like a cruel fist that would have to be unclenched, bit by bit, year after year.) Indeed, Maria sees Eutrope as no less than a symbol of the present lifestyle and the surrounding landscape: ‘une vie de labeur grossier dans un pays triste et sauvage’ (153; a life of heavy toil in a sad and wild land). Maria is clearly leaning towards Lorenzo and the big city, a preference that, once again, reflects less the person than the space he represents: ‘En vérité son choix était fait … l’éblouissement d’une vie lointaine dans la clarté pâle des cités.’ (156; In truth her choice was made … the glitter of a faraway life in the pale light of the city.) April, however, brings with it a major event that becomes crucial in Maria’s ultimate decision of a suitor / space: the illness and subsequent death of her mother. As her distraught father recounts his life with her mother and their persistent struggle to transform the wilderness into farmland, Maria is deeply moved, but fails to grasp why. As she looks out the window in search of answers,16 the lesson will come, as usual, from the landscape and in the form of a revelation:

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Maria, assise, près de la petite fenêtre, regarda quelque temps sans y penser le ciel, le sol blanc, la barre lointaine de la forêt, et tout à coup il lui sembla que cette question qu’elle s’était posée à elle-même venait de recevoir une réponse. Vivre ainsi, dans ce pays, comme sa mère avait vécu … Oui, elle serait capable de cela; et une sorte d’étonnement lui vint, comme si c’était là une nouvelle révélation inattendue.’ [188–9; Maria, seated near the small window, looked for awhile, without thinking about it, at the sky, the white earth, the faraway bar of the forest, and suddenly it seemed to her that this question she had asked herself just got an answer. To live in this land, like her mother had lived … yes, she would be capable of that; and a sort of astonishment came over her, as if it were a new unexpected revelation.]

But it is a lesson she hesitates to follow, and she continues to ask the telling question, ‘pourquoi rester là?’ (why stay here?). It is at this point, near the end of chapter sixteen, that she hears the famous voices whose message echoes throughout French-Canadian literature. Rather than repeat the well-known and frequently discussed message here, I will dwell on a lesser-noted yet highly significant aspect: the role of the landscape. First of all, Hémon makes it clear that the voices are those of Maria herself and come from within, the voices of her own conscience: ‘Elles n’avaient rien de miraculeux, ces voix; chacun de nous en entend de semblables lorsqu’il s’isole et se recueille assez pour laisser derrière lui le tumulte mesquin de la vie journalière. Seulement elles parlent plus haut et plus clair aux coeurs simples, au milieu des grands bois du Nord et des campagnes désolées.’ (190; They had nothing miraculous, these voices; each of us hears similar ones when we are alone and thoughful enough to leave behind the petty turmoil of everyday life. Only they speak louder and clearer to simple hearts, in the middle of the great woods of the North and the desolate countryside.) Although the voices are from the interior, they are released by a surrounding landscape that favours their perception and interpretation (‘au milieu des grands bois du Nord et des campagnes désolées’). Indeed the first voice is that of the land itself: ‘La première voix vint lui rappeler en chuchotant les cent douceurs méconnues du pays qu’elle voulait fuir.’ (190; The first voice came to remind her with a whisper of the hundred unrecognized pleasures of the land she wanted to flee.) The land is seen less as a combat of culture and nature than as their combination, and the ‘voice’ insists not only on the work, but on the beauty of the land, by invoking the very scene depicted in the October landscape, again in a visual manner: ‘à trois cents pas de la maison les

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rapides et la chute – écume blanche sur eau noire – , dont la seule vue répandait une fraîcheur délicieuse’ (191; three hundred feet from the house the rapids and the falls – white foam on black water – whose view alone spread a delicious freshness). In response to Maria’s second thoughts about the marvels of the faraway big city, a second voice invokes the importance of French language and culture, particularly in the place names of rural Quebec. In effect, the names mark the places as sites of memory, ‘dans sa mémoire’ (191), capable of evoking not only geography, but national history and personal ties through the heroes, forefathers, and friends linked to them. Still sceptical, Maria hears a third and final voice, that of the Quebec nation; the essential trait of the French-Canadian race that emerges from this incantation is that of persistence: ‘Nous sommes venus il y a trois cents ans, et nous sommes restés.’ (193; We came three hundred years ago, and we remained.)17 Persistence in confronting the wilderness and the weather; persistence in confronting other cultures; persistence in self-preservation and perpetuation: ‘Au pays de Québec rien ne doit mourir et rien ne doit changer.’ (194; In the land of Quebec, nothing must die and nothing must change.) In a sense, the three voices can be seen broadly as linked to space, place, and race respectively. Outside the window through which she looks, the landscape itself reflects the promise of winter’s end, and Maria understands that she must stay. She continues, however, to recognize the attraction of the alternative spaces, which remain as ideals and components of the French-Canadian landscape and identity: ‘Songeant avec un peu de regret pathétique aux merveilles lointaines qu’elle ne connaîtrait jamais et aussi aux souvenirs tristes du pays où il lui était commandé de vivre; à la flamme chaude qui n’avait caressé son cœur que pour s’éloigner sans retour, et aux grands bois emplis de neige d’où les garçons téméraires ne reviennent pas.’ (195; Thinking with some sad regret of the distant marvels she would never know and also of the sad memories of the land where she was bound to live; of the hot flame that had caressed her heart only to grow forever distant, and of the great snowfilled woods from which brave lads never return.) More than an individual choice, Maria’s decision is, as Paul Perron argues, the only one that works on a national level: ‘To remain true to historical, social, cultural, and religious values, Maria must not cross the limits of the frontier or house … Both the wilderness and the city are dangerous and forbidden spaces … What the novel does is to establish the boundaries within which the subject can determine itself in terms

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of the collective aspirations of the group. The frontier and the village are permitted, even necessary. They are the here and the there, the necessity and the possibility of the survival, continuity, and prosperity of the French-Canadian nation’ (188). And, in establishing these boundaries, the novel not only delineates its space, but itself becomes a place, a site of memory, indeed a magical one emitting its own voices and messages. If, in the following, short chapter that ends the novel, Maria tells Eutrope that she will marry him the following spring and thus remain in her present rural setting, it is not because she has rejected the city or the wilderness: she has simply recognized them as unrealizable alternatives for her. In particular, the paradise represented by François may be lost, but it is hardly forgotten, and the wilderness remains a persistent component of the French-Canadian identity, slated as it is to embrace contradiction. It is this very openness to different spatial locations, configurations, and connotations that causes Luc Bureau to question the traditional designation of Maria Chapdelaine as a ‘roman de la terre’ or a ‘roman du territoire.’ By focusing on the novel’s fifty-seven toponyms, recurring 234 times, Bureau notes that while 29 per cent allude to the ‘centre’ of the territory and 26 per cent to its periphery, a full 23 per cent designate faraway places, another 14 per cent foreign places, and 8 per cent refer to space in general. Since none is privileged to the exclusion or detriment of others, Bureau finds them complementary, not contradictory, and from their combination formulates an expanded vision of the notion of space and spatial experience, worth quoting extensively as we begin to move into ‘modern Quebec’ and on to, dare we say, globalization: Aucun espace ne peut être réduit à un espace. La fiction, le rêve, les sens, le mouvement, le passé, le futur travaillent directement sur les lieux et les font éclater en des myriades de scènes, de tableaux et de points de vue … ‘L’espace vécu’ pourrait-il être aussi ailleurs? À moins que la pensée, la parole, le rêve soient des phénomènes totalement étrangers à l’espèce humaine, irrémédiablement exclus de son champ d’expérience, l’on doit reconnaître que ‘l’espace vécu’ des Chapdelaine est aussi les États-Unis, la rivière Mistassini et Saint-André-de-l’Épouvante. L’expérience spatiale ne procède pas par soustraction ou par exclusion; chaque lieu s’additionne à l’autre et le complète … Lue dans cette optique, l’œuvre de Louis Hémon devient un ‘roman de la Terre’ plutôt qu’un soi-disant ‘roman de la terre.’ [176–7; No space can be reduced to a single space. Fiction, dreams, the senses, movement, the past, the future, work directly on these places and

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make them explode into a myriad of scenes, paintings, and viewpoints … Could it be otherwise with ‘lived space’? Unless thought, language, dreams are phenomena totally foreign to the human species, irrevocably excluded from the field of experience, one must recognize that the ‘lived space’ of the Chapdelaines is also the United States, the Mistassini River, and Saint-André-de-l’Épouvante. Spatial experience doesn’t proceed by subtraction or by exclusion; each place adds itself to another and completes it … Read from this perspective, Louis Hémon’s work becomes a ‘novel of the Earth’ rather than a so-called ‘novel of the earth.’]18

Coincidentally, but significantly, Guy Robert finds just such an openness in Lemieux’s painting, itself an exploration of modern Quebec identity: ‘L’horizon de son regard refuse le carcan d’étroites frontières et, grâce à des artistes comme lui, la réalité québécoise ne se réduit pas à un décor ou une étiquette, mais offre une façon parmi d’autres d’être homme, avec les inhérentes difficultés et la quote-part de paradoxe et d’ambiguïté. Ouverture sur le monde, et non plus renfrognement dans ses complexes ou béate contemplation de son nombril. Les pieds bien plantés dans l’humus d’ici, mais le regard au large, vers ce pays à inventer à travers visages et paysages, comme on s’invente d’abord au plus profond de soi.’ (Lemieux, 268–9; The horizon of his gaze refuses the yoke of narrow borders and, thanks to artists like him, the reality of Quebec cannnot be reduced to a decor or a label, but offers a way among others to be human, with its inherent difficulties and share of paradox and ambiguity. Opening onto the world and no longer sullen in its complexes or blissful contemplation of its belly button. Its feet well planted into this humus, but its gaze towards the horizon, towards this land to invent through faces and landscapes, as one invents oneself in the depths of one’s self.) Indeed, in explaining his reason for returning to Maria Chapdelaine, an icon of Quebec literature and culture, Lemieux himself stresses, rather, its universality: ‘J’aime à penser que cette vaillance persiste. Il y a quelque chose d’immuable, d’humain et d’universel qui m’attache à MARIA CHAPDELAINE.’ (3; I like to think that this valiance persists. There is something immutable, human, and universal that attaches me to MARIA CHAPDELAINE.) In remarkably similar fashion Clarence Gagnon stated that his purpose in illustrating Maria Chapdelaine was to catch the spirit of Canada and French-Canadian life, which the book immortalizes, but that ‘it is Canadian yet universal in its picture of a struggle where people are determined to maintain their own religion,

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language and customs’ (in Newlands, 117). A similar set of perceptions and motivations drove their fellow Charlevoix painter René Richard to illustrate his friend and compatriot Félix-Antoine Savard’s Menaud, maître-draveur, to which we now turn. Menaud, maître-draveur First published in 1937, Monseigneur Félix-Antoine Savard’s Menaud, maître-draveur has been designated as a major literary milestone by numerous critics.19 This multifaceted novel, with its epic flavour,20 recounts the tale of an aging log driver, Menaud, a would-be coureur de bois bound reluctantly to the rugged farmland in northwest Charlevoix by his now deceased wife and his daughter Marie. Menaud displaces his overwhelming desire for freedom onto his son, Joson, only to lose him in a fatal accident during an always dangerous log drive (chapter four), which ends the first part of the novel, set in the spring and dominated by a particular aspect of the landscape: the river. The second part of the novel (chapters five–seven) is set in summer on the farmland at Mainsal, as the restless Menaud becomes increasingly embittered by the invasion of his territory by foreign (i.e., English-speaking) investors. He enlists his surrogate son Alexis (called Le Lucon), his daughter’s suitor and rival of Le Délié (who has sold out to the invaders), to join him in resisting the invasion. In the final part of the novel, spanning autumn, winter, and the following spring, the two renegades decide to continue to hunt and trap in the nearby mountains, now under the economic and legal control of the foreigners, but an ongoing symbol of freedom.21 The lure of emigration, rejected in Maria Chapdelaine two decades earlier, has been supplanted in Menaud, maître-draveur by a threatening influx of foreign industrialism no longer possible to circumvent for Savard, who seeks to bring this economic development of the 1930s to the consciousness of his compatriots. Although the topography and toponyms of Charlevoix are meticulously charted, the novel is devoid of dates and historical references, yet nonetheless clearly situated during the bleak economic times of the Great Depression, as Aurélien Boivin explains in his ‘présentation’ of the novel before concluding that ‘Savard a voulu défendre le salut de la race canadienne-française par la prise de possession du territoire et de la terre’ (9; Savard wanted to defend the salvation of the French-Canadian race through taking possession of the territory and the land). Thomas Vauterin, however, sees in

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this very possessiveness, the germs of a nascent desire for capitalism, industrialism, and even urbanization among the French-Canadian elite itself ‘à l’aube de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, aux bords d’une Amérique industrialisée et commerçante. Il y a dans l’air idéologique du Canada français cette nette volonté de conquérir le monde capitaliste de la production, de participer activement à la modernité’ (185; at the dawn of the Second World War, bordered by an industrialized and mercantile America. In the ideological air of French Canada there is this clear will to conquer the capitalist world of productivity, to participate actively in modernity). Although seemingly at odds, both arguments, taken together, constitute yet another manifestation of the wilful contradictions inherent in the French-Canadian identity, including faithfulness to heritage and desire for renewal (Létourneau, 12–13). At any rate both arguments are based on the notion of land – the ‘territory’ for Boivin, the forest for Vauterin – and it is through the representation of the landscape that Savard airs the elements of this crucial debate. Furthermore, both arguments involve a dichotomy within that landscape between the wild space of nature and a more ‘civilized’ place, ordered by agriculture for Boivin (13), by industrialism for Vauterin (187), two forms, in my terms, of culture. Part One: The River With its central contrast between farmer and adventurer, Menaud, maîtredraveur has obvious echoes of Maria Chapdelaine, and indeed begins with an epigraph taken from the final pages of Hémon’s novel, during the famous episode of the voices that visit Maria: ‘Nous sommes venus il y a trois cents ans et nous sommes restés.’ (23; We came three hundred years ago and we remained.)22 Moreover, in the opening scene, Marie reads Hémon’s passage to Menaud, who repeats the phrase ‘Une race qui ne sait pas mourir’ (A race that will not die) several times like a refrain in this scene and retains it, like a haunting melody, throughout the novel (see Beaudet, 59–60). This initial reading from Maria Chapdelaine is also interwoven with a description of the landscape, hardly surprising by now in FrenchCanadian fiction. Quite different from its predecessors, however, this and other landscapes in Savard’s novel are often put together in mosaic fashion, a mixture of perception, recollection, and projection, which forms a composite description that is juxtaposed with quotations from its ever-present textual ancestor.23 In a sense, Hémon’s book (culture) is intertwined with and superimposed onto Savard’s landscape (nature).

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The first sentence, for example, immediately following the epigraph and right before the outset of the reading, sets the viewpoint (the window) and the viewer (Menaud) – ‘Menaud était assis à sa fenêtre et replié sur lui-même’ (23; Menaud was seated by the window and absorbed in himself) – and suggests a psychological or ideological dimension (‘replié sur lui même’). On the next page, as Menaud murmurs the words ‘rien n’a changé’ (nothing has changed) from Hémon’s novel, the reader discovers the object of his perception, the distant mountains – ‘Violemment, à coups secs, il secoua sa pipe sur son talon, s’appuya, un instant, au cadre de la fenêtre, regarda du côté des libres montagnes, qu’on pouvait encore distinguer au loin’ (24; Violently, with sharp taps, he emptied his pipe against his heel, leaned for an instant on the window frame, gazed out towards the free mountains, which one could still make out in the distance); the adverb ‘violently’ captures the strength of his emotions, while the adjective qualifying the mountains, ‘free,’ highlighted by its unusual placement in French before the noun, both indicates the strength of his desire and suggests the origin of his frustrations, the lost freedom of the native French Canadian due to the ‘foreigner,’ who had just been mentioned in Marie’s reading. Both the textual citation and the description continue on the next page, as Menaud mumbles ‘une race qui ne sait pas mourir,’ then moves from the window to the door, as if to escape from the confines of his house towards the distant mountains, already signalled as a symbol of freedom: ‘Puis, il ouvrit la porte toute grande; et, dans le soir immobile, il contempla longtemps la campagne endormie, laissant ses regards voler jusqu’aux horizons lointains, et revenir ainsi que des engoulevents au nid de ses pensées.’ (25; Then he thrust the door wide open; and, in the immobile evening, he contemplated the sleeping countryside for a long time, allowing his gaze to fly as far as the distant horizons, and return like nighthawks to the nest of his thoughts.) The tension between his own ‘immobility,’ projected onto the evening, and his desire for escape, captured by the ‘flight’ of his gaze, is coupled with a movement between the external landscape (the mountains) and his internal thoughts, revealed by a metaphor borrowed from nature (‘nighthawks … nest’) and applied to his thoughts, yet which also alludes to his home. The landscape description is then combined with a portrait – ‘L’homme était beau à voir. Droit et fort malgré la soixantaine. La vie dure avait décharné à fond son visage, y creusant des rigoles et des rides de misère, et le colorant des mêmes ocres et des mêmes gris que les maisons, les rochers et les terres de Mainsal’ (25; The man was handsome to look at.

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Straight and strong despite his sixty years. A hard life had made his face exceedingly gaunt, cutting furrows and wrinkles of hardship into it, and colouring it in the same ochres and greys as the houses, the rocks, and the fields of Mainsal) – in which the man and his land are linked by colour (‘ocres,’ ‘gris’), texture (‘dure,’ ‘décharné’), and hardship (‘misère’). The ‘landscape’ is then completed and its significance defined by a memory reported by the narrator: ‘Sa femme avait tout fait pour enraciner au sol ce fier coureur de bois. Et lui, par amour pour elle, il avait défriché cette âpre terre de Mainsal, toujours prêt, cependant, à s’évader du regard vers le bleu des monts dès que le vent du Nord venait lui verser au coeur les paroles magiques et les philtres embaumés.’ (26; His wife had done her utmost to root this proud coureur de bois into the soil. And he, by love for her, had cleared this harsh land of Mainsal, always ready, however, to escape with a gaze towards the blue of the mountains whenever the wind came from the north to pour into his heart its magic words and fragrant potions.) Here the contrast between the farmer and the coureur, the field and the mountain, is formulated clearly, and the meaning of the latter as escape and ideal (suggested by the colour blue, brought out by the nominal rather than the more usual adjectival form) is revealed and reinforced.24 In a lithograph titled Territoire de Menaud, which appears as an engraving before chapters two–ten of the 1979 edition of the novel, the last one somewhat larger than the others, Savard’s fellow Charlevoix resident and close friend René Richard similarly reduces the colours of the land to ochre and grey, while setting them in opposition to the blue of the river (plate 7).25 The isolation of the three farm buildings further adds to the sense of hardship of this rugged land and dilapidated farm perched on a cliff overlooking the river. Richard heightens the striking difference between the agricultural setting in the foreground and the natural space in the far ground, not only by the contrasting blue colour of the river, but also by the free flowing and highly visible strokes used to render it, in direct contrast with the intricate, repetitive patchwork of crosshatching used to capture the regularity and monotony of the furrowed farmland. Indeed, a hint of Menaud’s restlessness can also be detected in Richard’s work, as Guy Robert describes it: ‘Sa nature est fruste comme son dessein et son coup de pinceau.’ (Peinture, 126–7; His nature is raw like his drawing and brushwork.)26 Richard’s highly overt technique suits Savard’s salient prose style, which is based on analogies constructed from the dominant elements of the setting, such as his comparison of Menaud’s growing patriotism to

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a river at springtime: ‘tel un fleuve de printemps, à pleine mesure d’âme, l’amour de son pays’ (26; like a river in spring, to the full measure of his soul, his love of country). This example, as well as most of the novel’s figurative language supports Anthony Purdy’s observation that Savard’s metaphors are essentially ‘metonymical,’ in that they arise from the spatial, temporal, and psychological context of the text itself (71; see also Ricard, 62–72). Throughout the novel the setting is interwoven metaphorically with the character’s emotions, and Savard even points to (and points out) the nature of his own style by highlighting the woven tapestries of Marie and her deceased mother, which capture the same landscape seen throughout the chapter: ‘Les lourdes catalognes barrées où, par bandes, sa mère avait étalé la couleur des paysages et des saisons: du bleu de montagne, du jaune de blé mûr et, entre eux, de larges quartiers tout blancs comme les champs de neige de son pays’ (32; The thick striped cloth where, in bands, her mother had laid out the colours of the landscapes and the seasons: the blue of the mountains, the yellow of the ripe wheat, and, between them, large panels of intense white like the fields of snow in her land). Savard’s highly visible style can perhaps be characterized by borrowing a term the narrator uses to describe the log drivers’ evening dance – ‘lyrisme sauvage’ (43; wild lyricism) – which captures also the sense of freedom Menaud feels before the fleeting riverside landscape: ‘Il se sentait libre enfin, humant l’air vif, et jouissant de revoir cette longue bande de forêt riveraine. Cette fois c’était bien elle, sa vie, que tout cela: paysages coupés de tourbières et de broussailles, lacs dorés du ciel, pâtis de brouillards, grandes barres de lumière, grandes barres d’ombre, jardins d’éricales, vasières gris bleu: et, sous le manteau d’apparence immobile, toute une vie réduite par l’hiver et qui se libérait soudain, se dilatait à l’aurore et s’exaltait en un vol aussitôt replongé dans la forêt humide du matin.’ (55–6; He finally felt free, taking in the fresh air and rejoicing again at the sight of this long band of riverside forest. This was really his life: landscapes cut by bogs and brush, lakes gilded by the sun, pastures of fog, great bands of light, great bars of shadow, gardens of arbutus, greyish blue swamps: and cloaked in apparent immobility, an entire life subdued by winter that was suddenly freeing itself, expanding with the dawn and exalting in a flight soon brought back to the humid morning forest.) Savard’s lyrical liberty stems from several sources: the closeness of man and nature in the first sentence; the unbroken accumulation of six nouns representing different segments and

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colourations of the landscape, highlighted by the absence of articles and joined by their very linguistic proximity in the second sentence; the powerful, musical rhythm of the sentence engendered by the accumulation of the nouns and the continuation of the sentence in a final movement, perfectly balanced by the repetition of the three reflexive verbs, occurring at regular intervals and displaying the same sounds (‘se,’ ‘ait’), which adds to the musicality of the passage and the feeling of ‘exaltation,’ describing at once the viewer (Menaud), the countryside (through personification), and the sentence itself, which rises, then falls as it comes to an end.27 Richard’s encampment scene (figure 6.4), Campement, one of four lithographs on this theme of the twenty in the portfolio of his illustrated edition of the novel, involves a similar melding of man and the various components of nature. Like Savard’s passage, Richard’s composition involves the amalgamation of several components of the landscape into a single image, composed of horizontal bands receding towards the horizon – the shoreline, the river, the mountains, and the sky – each characterized by its own highly visible pattern of strokes, yet harmonized by an overall colouring of violets and blues, along with the complementary yellows and joined together by the vertical thrust of the ghostly white trees, which intersect all four horizontal bands to form a highly structured grid, which then sets off the warm place of the human camp set against the vast space of nature. As the painter’s close friend, the novelist Gabrielle Roy describes one of the recurrent motifs of his work: ‘C’est un petit campement isolé, souvent clos et abandonné. Parfois, il est vrai, une lueur y brille, et on en est tout réjoui. Si René Richard a exprimé en effet comme personne la détresse de l’être humain réduit à hiverner seul au bout du monde, il est aussi celui qui a traduit la joie d’un solitaire rencontrant un autre solitaire.’ (‘Préface,’ 36–7; It’s a small, isolated encampment, often closed up and abandoned. Sometimes, in truth, a light is shining, and one rejoices in it. If René Richard has in fact expressed like no one else the distress of the human being forced to winter alone at world’s end, it is also he who has best translated the joy of one solitary figure meeting another.) Savard’s description of the log drivers at work (‘la drave’) displays other linguistic forms that contribute to his ‘wild lyricism’: Ohé! ohé! Tandis que les hommes agiles trimaient des jambes et des bras sur les bords du chenal, et que le soleil, de sa cymbale d’or, frappait le pays d’alentour pour l’éveiller à la vie, Menaud s’exaltait devant le spectacle

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6.4 René Richard, Sans titre (Campement), vers 1975. Dessin au crayon de couleur et stylo-feutre sur carton brun, 57 x 73 cm. Université Laval. Photo: Marc Robitaille. © Fondation René Richard / Untitled (Campsite), circa 1975. Coloured pencils and felt-tipped pen drawing on brown cardboard, 57 x 73 cm. Université Laval. Photo: Marc Robitaille. © Fondation René Richard.

des gais vainqueurs d’embâcles. Au-dessus du tumulte, passait dans la coupe, le souvenir des grands hardis, des grands musclés, des grands libres d’autrefois: défilé triomphal dans les musiques de l’eau guerrière, du vent de plaine et du vent de montagne, sous les étendards de vapeur chaude qu’au-dessus du sol libéré déployait le printemps. Tout cela chantait: ‘Nous sommes venus il y a trois cents ans et nous sommes restés!’ [59; Ahoy! Ahoy! While the agile men wore out legs and arms on the edges of the channel, and the sun beat the surrounding country with its golden

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cymbal to bring it to life, Menaud rejoiced at the spectacle of these gay logjam conquerors. Above the tumult, passing through the bower was the memory of the hardy men, the muscled men, the free men of the past: a triumphant march to the music of warring waters, of wind-swept plains, of breezy mountains, under the banners of hot vapour deployed by spring above the liberated land. Everything was singing: ‘We came three hundred years ago, and we remained!’]

The explicit musicality of the passage, brought out by the personification of the rushing water (‘les musiques de l’eau guerrière)28 and the springtime (‘Tout cela chantait’), is initiated by the chant of the drivers (‘Ohé! Ohé!’), continued by the metaphor of the sun as a cymbal (‘de sa cymbale d’or’), and sustained by the rhythmic groups of three verbs (‘trimaient,’ ‘frappait,’ ‘s’exaltait’), three adjectives (‘grands,’ ‘grands,’ ‘grands’), and three places (‘l’eau,’ ‘plaine,’ ‘montagne’). At the same time, Savard raises this musical scene to a mythic level and the drivers to a heroic status by the military expression ‘gais vainqueurs,’ the repetition of ‘grands’ with a link to the past (‘souvenir’), brought out by the inversion of subject and verb (‘passait’), the repetition of ‘au dessus’ to suggest elevation, the repetition of ‘du vent’ to create movement, the metaphor of a parade (‘défilé’) complete with flags (‘étendards’), and culminating with the inclusion of the heroic words from the literary past: ‘Nous sommes venus il y a trois cents ans et nous sommes restés!’29 In a sense, here, the text (culture) is superimposed onto the landscape (nature) through the medium of Menaud’s consciousness, which, both despite and because of the repetition, is evolving. A similarly musical and mythical flavour emerges from Richard’s drawings of the drivers, as in Les draveurs, one of seven lithographs on this theme in the portfolio for the novel (figure 6.5). Here the dynamic strokes, twisted forms, and vivid colours accentuate the intense action of the workmen, while the dominant gold and white wave-like strokes emanating from the horizon lend the scene an aura of heroic grandeur, not unlike that of Savard’s passage, and, according to Jean-Guy Paquet, typical of Richard’s work whatever the medium: ‘La facture est si directe, si franche, c’est comme si l’on assistait à la genèse d’un monde que l’artiste construit énergiquement, à grands coups de crayon, de plume ou de pinceau.’ (The technique is so direct, so frank, it’s as if one were witnessing the genesis of a world, which the artist constructs energetically, with great strokes of pencil, pen, or brush.)30

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6.5 René Richard, Les draveurs, vers 1979. Dessin crayons-feutre et crayons de couleur, 37,5 x 39 cm. Université Laval. Photo: Marc Robitaille. © Fondation René Richard / The Log Drivers, circa 1979. Felt-tipped pencil and coloured pencil drawing, 37.5 x 39 cm. Université Laval. Photo: Marc Robitaille. © Fondation René Richard.

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Part Two: The Farmland The heroic elevation of these pages is cut short by Joson’s death, and Menaud’s elation is brought rudely back to earth, literally, by his return to the farm in the second part of the novel (chapters five–seven). Set in summer, the liquid medium of the river in part one is replaced by fire: metaphorically through expressions like ‘l’air est en feu’ (105; the air is afire); symbolically by Menaud’s growing patriotism, Le Lucon’s growing passion for Marie, and the spurned Le Délié’s growing hatred; and literally by two fires: the first a bonfire set by Menaud, which he sees as a sign of deliverance (78); the second a conflagration that nearly destroys Mainsal but galvanizes community solidarity. The second part of the novel is also one of growing consciousness. Menaud, whose obsession with the mountains initially contrasts with his neighbour Josime’s love of the farmland (72), becomes increasingly aware of the inseparability of the two spaces and the people associated with them: En somme, tout cela, tout autour, dans les champs et sur la montagne, assurait qu’une race fidèle entre dans la durée de la terre elle même … C’était le sens des paroles: ‘Ces gens sont d’une race qui ne sait pas mourir…’ On avait survecu parce que les paysans comme Josime, les coureurs de bois, comme lui-même, s’étaient appliqués, d’esprit et de cœur, les premiers aux sillons, les autres, à la montagne, à tout le libre domaine des eaux et des bois. [80–1; In short, all that, everything around, in the fields and on the mountains, proclaimed that a faithful race take its place in the continuance of the earth itself … That was the sense of the words: ‘These people are of a race that will not die…’ They had survived because peasants like Josime and adventurers like himself had applied themselves, body and soul, the former to the fields, the latter to the mountains, to the whole free realm of waters and woods.]

In effect, Menaud now sees a single race composed of two types of contrasting personalities, and a single country, composed of two contrasting spaces. As Boivin states, in his presentation of the novel, commenting on this very passage: ‘Deux espaces se répondent donc dans Menaud, maître-draveur: la terre (ou les champs) et le bois (ou la Montagne); deux espaces: l’un civilisé et l’autre sauvage.’ (13; Thus two spaces correlate in Menaud, maître-draveur: the land (or the fields) and the woods (or the Mountains); two spaces: one civilized the other wild.) Moreover, these

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two spaces, these two domains are inseparable, since nature nurtures civilization, as Menaud comes to learn: ‘Cette nature, elle semblait l’aimer depuis le jour, lointain déjà, où il s’était appliqué à la connaître. Elle lui donnait l’air vierge et pur de la montagne, l’eau de ses sources, le bois de sa maison, l’écorce de son toit, le feu de son foyer qui, le soir pour le plaisir de ses yeux, dansait follement comme une jeunesse sur les bûches et dont la chaleur lui caressait le visage, l’enveloppait dans l’or de ses rayons.’ (60; This nature seemed to love him from the day, now faraway, when he applied himself to knowing her. She gave him the pure, virgin air of the mountains, the water for his springs, the wood for his house, the bark for his roof, the fire for his hearth, which, in the evening, for the pleasure of his eyes, danced wildly like youth on the logs, caressing his face with warmth and embracing him with its golden rays.) The connection is causal, but also emotional and perceptual, and in all cases involves a double movement that is dynamic not static, as nature is seen as forming not a contrast but a continuum with culture.31 A parallel growth of consciousness characterizes the love triangle formed by Marie, Le Délié, to whom she is initially attracted by his ambition and sensuality, and Le Lucon, whose patriotism begins to win her over. Marie’s discovery is itself brought out by the landscape, in a description whose theme of blueberry picking during the fête de SainteAnne recalls (at some remove yet with considerable relevance) chapter five of Maria Chapdelaine. Whereas, in the earlier scene, Maria discovered her love for François Paradis, here Marie becomes aware of her aversion for Le Délié and of her own patriotism, both elicited by the landscape. Again constructed of pieces interwoven together and interacting with the characters’ consciousness, the first segment begins with Marie’s elevated viewpoint. Like her father in the preceding chapter, Marie sees her country as composed of two complementary components – ‘soit des bois, soit des champs’ (89; either the woods or the fields) – unified by fresh air and freedom and contrasted with the city, an opposition running throughout the rustic novel, from La terre paternelle to Maria Chapdelaine. Her exalted meditation is interrupted by the surreptitious arrival of Le Délié, who in turn looks out over the landscape, as if to claim it personally (90). His possessive stance towards the land (mountains, woods, and fields) and aggressive posture against his own race (‘clan’) spur the narrator to an overt judgment (‘rogue’) and an invocation of the reader (‘vous’), and further cause Maria to react against Le Délié (whose very name suggests a lack of ties) and bond with both land and clan, as witnessed in the final segment of the passage:

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Marie regarda les champs où les hommes s’affairaient autour des veillottes comme des abeilles autour des ruches, les cadres paisibles des avoines et des blés dans toute la force du vert, ceux des pacages avec leurs cairns de roches: simples monuments dressés en souvenir des mains qui s’étaient usées, des reins qui s’étaient rompus depuis des générations et des générations à nettoyer la face de cette terre. Dans le pendant, à droite, elle regarda l’abatis de Joson, avec ses cailloux entassés par le grand frère et qui ressemblaient à des oeufs dans la corbeille des ronces. Plus loin, làbas, c’était la haute muraille, c’était le grand fief de chasse que Marie ne connaissait pas, mais où, d’après les dires de son père, régnait ce qu’il y a de plus beau sous le soleil: la liberté. [91; Marie looked over the fields where the men were working around the haystacks like bees around hives, the peaceful surroundings of oats and wheat in full force of green, of pastures with their cairns of rocks: simple monuments erected in memory of worn hands and broken backs from generations and generations of clearing the face of the land. In the matching piece to the right she saw Joson’s clearing, with her big brother’s pile of stones, looking like eggs in a basket of brambles. Farther on, beyond, was the high rampart, the great freehold for hunting where Marie hadn’t been but where, according to her father, there reigned what was most beautiful under the sun: liberty.]

Now, what had been seen as mere space becomes intimate place, indeed sites of memory (‘monuments dressés en souvenir’) of the ancestors and deeds that had given the country its freedom and identity through persistence. As with Maria before her, the landscape evokes a voice from within for Marie: ‘Une voix, dans la profondeur de son sang, demandait à crier.’ (92; A voice, from the depths of her blood, wanted to cry out.) By the end of part two her affections align with those of the patriotic Le Lucon, felled by a treacherous blow from Le Délié but nursed back to health by Marie. Part Three: The Mountains The third part of the novel is dominated by the presence of the mountains, which, like the fields in part two, evolve from a distant space to a meaningful place, first for Menaud, then for Le Lucon and Marie. Although the words ‘montagne’ or ‘mont’ occur some fifty times in the novel, beginning with the second page and appearing consistently throughout, it is not until the final pages of the novel’s second part that Menaud begins to see the mountains not as a remote and elusive symbol

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of freedom but as a ‘place,’ a repository of memory and identity: ‘Il revit surtout ses lieux à lui: ses montagnes, ses eaux et, sous la paix innombrable des feuilles silencieuses, sa cabane où l’attendait, comme une épouse … la liberté … Menaud s’étant rassis, se mit alors à souffrir dans tous les liens qui le rattachaient à tous les lieux de la montagne, profonds et sacrés comme le sanctuaire même de son pays.’ (113; He reviewed especially his own places: his mountains, his waters, and under the vast peace of silent leaves, his cabin, where awaiting him like a spouse … was liberty … Having sat down again, Menaud began to suffer from all the ties that bound him to all the places in the mountains, profound and sacred like the very sanctuary of his land.) Menaud’s identification with the previously distant mountains is signalled initially by the possessive adjective (‘ses montagnes’); then, set against the vast space, is a personal place (‘sa cabane’), which enables him to see freedom in intimate not abstract terms (‘comme une épouse’). Indeed, he is now able to view the mountains, less as an amorphous space than as a series of specific places (‘lieux’), which together have a unified meaning captured by an architectural and religious – that is, cultural – metaphor (‘sanctuaire’). This same sort of architectural form and cultural significance is attributed to the mountains throughout the final part of the novel: by the mountain’s name, la Basilique (121), as well as by architectural metaphors like ‘ce cirque’ (120), ‘le dôme’ (137), ‘les sanctuaires’ (139), and ‘colonnades’ (143). In addition to the ongoing sense of freedom engendered by the mountain, its specific meaning is made clear in a landscape description early in the novel’s final part: Il contemple la montagne qui est le diadème précieux de l’horizon, entre la plaine qui mue et le ciel qui roule, l’image de l’éternel, le bleu immobile qui sépare le double champ de l’éphémère. Ce matin il lui semble que tout le passé est là, dans ce cirque remué de pourpre et d’or. Le décor a provoqué! Un héraut invisible, dans tous les défilés de la montagne, a sonné du cor. Alors, de tous les points, les preux sont accourus. Ils répètent ce qu’a dit le livre, un soir du dernier printemps: ‘Nous sommes venus, il y a trois cents ans et nous sommes restés.’ [120; He contemplates the mountain, the precious crown of the horizon, between the changing plain and the rolling sky, the immobile blue that separates the two ephemeral spheres. This morning it seems to him that the whole past is there, in this circus of shifting purple and gold. The decor has acted! An invisible herald, in all the mountain paths, has sounded his horn. Then, from all points, the brave

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came running, repeating what the book said one evening last spring: ‘We came three hundred years ago, and we remained.’]

From the outset, Menaud is designated as the viewer of the scene (‘Il contemple’) and infused with an intensity captured by the present tense. Rather than viewing the mountain as an ideal removed to the horizon, he now sees it as the focal point, brought out by the definite article and crystallized by the metaphor of the crown, which mediates between the fields and the sky, themselves now seen as ephemeral.32 Moreover, the mountain’s meaning manifests itself not as a dream of the future but as a repository of the past (‘tout le passé est là’) and thus of national identity, reinforced by the reappearance of Hémon’s text: ‘Nous sommes venus, il y a trois cents ans et nous sommes restés.’ Unlike Hémon, however, whose notion of identity seems limited to persistence, Savard’s is one of freedom and resistance, as suggested by the metaphor of the mountain as an invisible herald, sounding the horn for the legions of the brave (‘les preux’). Moreover, the voices themselves are beginning to acquire an intensity described eloquently by Ricard: ‘Chantantes et diffuses chez Louis Hémon, elles prennent ici un air martial, comme soumises au pendule d’un métronome obsédant. Elles ne sont plus le chant de femme sorti doucement du silence recuilli de la nuit; au contraire, c’est de la tempête qu’elles surgissent, de la violence, résonnant comme des coups de gong au cœur essoufflé de Menaud.’ (96–7, his italics; Singing and spread out for Louis Hémon, here they take on a martial air, as if controlled by the pendulum of an obsessive metronome. They are no longer a woman’s song, emerging softly out of the meditative silence of the night; quite the contrary, it’s from a storm that they erupt, with violence, resounding like the blows of a gong within Menaud’s breathless heart.) For Savard, persistence may be one trait of French-Canadian identity, but it must be complemented by a strong sense of freedom and the determination to preserve and proclaim it. Le Lucon resists Marie’s call to ‘vivre icitte … tranquille’ (131–2; live here peacefully) on the grounds that personal tranquility limits freedom of the race, and an inner voice tells him: ‘Délivre la liberté captive en ton sang.’ (133; Deliver the captive liberty in your blood.) When his resolve later falters, Marie reminds him that ‘il faut penser à tout le pays aussi’ (154; one must also consider the entire country) and encourages him to continue the message of Menaud, now demented due to overexposure in the snows of the mountain, where he and Le Lucon had gone as an act of resistance against the legal restrictions of the hated foreigner.33

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In that fatal penultimate chapter, set in winter, Menaud and Le Lucon found the landscape again intertwined with Hémon’s book: ‘Alors sur les pages neuves de l’hiver, tous, ils écrivent comme dans le beau livre: “Nous sommes venus il y a trois cents ans, et nous sommes restés.”’ (135; Then on winter’s new pages, they all write as in the beautiful book: ‘We came three hundred years ago, and we remained.’) On a literal level, tracks in the snow reveal the forbidden presence and thus resistance of the patriots, but they will disappear with the spring thaw. On a literary level, the book itself, imposed on the landscape, lends it a meaning steeped in French-Canadian literary history, as MarieAndrée Beaudet contends: ‘La fréquence de l’emploi de l’article défini … marque le caractère singulier du rapport qui unit Menaud, maîtredraveur à Maria Chapdelaine et le roman de Hémon à l’histoire du roman québécois.’ (61; The frequent use of the definite article … marks the singular character of the relationship linking Menaud to Maria and Hémon’s novel to the history of the Quebecois novel.) At any rate, the superimposition of past (1914) on present (1937, but also 1964, the time of Savard’s final revision during the Quiet Revolution) leads to a discursive telescoping of periods that recalls Gérard Namer’s description of the process of commemoration, suggested also in Ricard’s pointed analysis: ‘Il y a, dans Menaud, maître-draveur, un curieux phénomène de syncopation temporelle, qui étend sur la durée une sorte d’éternel passé, période héroïque où essaient de rentrer Menaud, Le Lucon et Marie.’ (69; There is, in Menaud, maître-draveur, a curious phenomenon of temporal syncopation that lays on the present a sort of eternal past, a heroic period that Menaud, Le Lucon, and Marie attempt to relive.) Whereas Boivin is correct in identifying the importance of freedom, represented by the mountain on a thematic level (13), on a stylistic level, one must also recognize the supreme significance of the ultimate form of culture for Savard: art, not a rival of but a bridge to religion for this missionary, at once author and priest. Not only does Hémon’s novel appear as often as the mountain, and frequently in conjunction with it, other forms of art like Marie’s and her mother’s tapestry (with images of the landscape), Le Lucon’s music (with its sense of freedom), his sculpted cup (a symbol of his love for Marie), the log drivers’ dance (suggesting their energy), and songs like ‘La Malhurée’ (recalling past tradition) also represent recurrent French-Canadian values. Not only does art persist, it protects, proclaims, and preserves identity, while remaining an important aspect of it. Savard’s novel becomes itself a memorial, a site of memory, a cultural place, which, alongside

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the freedom of space, captures the inherent complexity and contradictions of this race that will not die. Significantly, a similar sense of the responsibility to work, and to the work, also qualifies Richard’s sense of freedom – ‘c’est dans cette optique de bourreau de travail et de perfectionnement que j’ai utilisé ma liberté d’homme des bois et de peintre’ (in Pelletier, 156; it’s from the perspective of a glutton for work that I used my freedom as adventurer and painter) – as we shall further witness in chapter 8.

Chapter Seven

Liberation and Modernity in the Wake of the War

Much as the period from the turn of the century to the First World War had witnessed profound changes in society and technology, favouring the adaptation of the dynamic properties of Impressionism to Canadian painting and literature (chapter five), the years within and following the Second World War saw radical changes occur in Quebec, in this case with artistic innovations announcing, accompanying, perhaps even inaugurating cultural and societal transformation. Paul-Émile Borduas, considered by many as the first original Canadian painter, begins his earth-shaking manifesto, Refus global (Total Refusal), with a devastating description of Quebec society: ‘Rejetons de modestes familles canadiennes françaises, ouvrières ou petites bourgeoises, de l’arrivée du pays à nos jours restées françaises et catholiques par résistance au vainqueur, par attachement arbitraire au passé, par plaisir et orgueil sentimental et autres nécessités … Tenu à l’écart de l’évolution universelle de la pensée pleine de risques et de dangers.’ (45; Descendants of modest French-Canadian families, labourers or petit bourgeois, from our arrival on this soil up to the present day kept French and Catholic by resistance to the conqueror, by an irrational attachment to the past, by self-indulgence and sentimental pride and other compulsions … shielded from the broader evolution of thought as too risky and dangerous.) This conservative isolationism seemed particularly anachronistic in light of social, industrial, urban, and technological advances during and following the Second World War,1 and would reach its nadir, for Borduas, from 1944 to 1959, during the regime of the ultra-conservative Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis. Determined to shelter traditional values and avoid assimilation, Duplessis sought more political autonomy and greater cultural isolation for the province. Yet, the bastion that wards off

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cultural and natural intrusion was felt by Borduas to wall in the individual – person and nation – leading to the repression of freedom. The breach in these walls was initiated in 1948 by his hard-hitting manifesto, which Dennis Reid considers as ‘the single most important social document in Quebec history and the most important aesthetic statement a Canadian has ever made’ (A Concise History, 233). Borduas: Refus global and Les arbres dans la nuit In 1948, when a group of young painters (including Jean-Claude Riopelle) and writers (including Claude Gauvreau) published a collection of texts and visual works, headed by Paul-Émile Borduas’s manifesto ‘Refus global,’ which then lent its name to the entire volume, the cultural climate was particularly stifling, as Gagnon and Young note: ‘a period which, politically, socially and ideologically, saw the last excesses in the Province of Quebec of the regime of oppression of Maurice Duplessis … his regime was completely philistine and attached no importance to art or letters’ (16). In this setting, the manifesto exploded like a bomb and led to Borduas’s dismissal from his teaching position at the École du meuble, thereby confirming his claims of political and artistic oppression. Not surprising for a painter, Borduas repeatedly uses spatial metaphors to characterize Quebec society, including ‘les murs lisses de la peur, refuge habituel des vaincus’ (45; unscalable walls of fear, familiar refuge of the vanquished); ‘les lieux bénis de la peur’ (45; fear-ridden places); and ‘blocus spirituel’ (45; blockade of the spirit). However, ‘des perles incontrôlables suintent hors les murs’ (45; some pearls slip through the walls), and the breach widens, shrinks, then grows again (‘lentement la brêche s’élargit, se rétrécit, s’élargit encore’ [46]) due to revolutionary works, until ‘les frontières de nos rêves ne sont plus les mêmes’ (47; the limits of our dreams become no longer what they were), opening new ‘horizons.’ In effect, confined place begins to yield to the unlimited space of the imagination. After detailing the social ills brought on by Western ‘civilization’ (48), dominated as it is by Christianity, whose demise he encourages and predicts (49), Borduas concludes with a powerful statement on behalf of his group, returning to spatial metaphors and explaining the notion of refusal in his title: ‘Refus d’un cantonnement dans la seule bourgade plastique, place fortifiée mais trop facile d’évitement. Refus de se taire.’ (51; Refusal to be ghettoed in an ivory tower, well-fortified but too easy

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to ignore; refusal to remain silent.) Calling for ‘le risqué total dans le refus global’ (52; the risk of all in total refusal), Borduas invites all those committed to freedom to join in a collective effort of artistic, and thus social transformation: ‘Que ceux tentés par l’aventure se joignent à nous … nous poursuivrons dans la joie notre sauvage besoin de liberation.’ (54; Let those who are inspired by this endeavour join us … we shall pursue in joy our overwhelming need for liberation.) The word ‘sauvage’ in the French text implies an affirmation of nature and natural forces in their most primitive sense – ‘forces vives’ (53) – and a concomitant rejection of culture in all its common forms: institutions like the church, icons like popular works of art, and the very faculty of reason. Borduas and his group favour the natural realm of imagination, accessible through spontaneity, which for them, takes the form of ‘automatisme surrationnel,’ akin to the methods of automatic writing and painting practised by the French surrealists, but with specifically French-Canadian forms and values.2 And what arms does one muster to attack culture but those of its negative correlative: nature.3 Indeed, many of the natural icons wielded in the work of the automatists are those already identified in this book – including the tree, the garden, the river, and the mountain. I hasten to clarify, in relation to the key pairing of nature and culture in our discussion, that far from toppling culture and disturbing its equilibrium with nature, Borduas rejects culture in its common form, termed ‘culture première’ by Fernand Dumont, in order to arrive at a higher sense or ‘civilisation impatiente de naître’ (53; civilization impatient to be born), tellingly akin to Dumont’s ‘culture seconde.’ In fact, as Dumont himself put it in a strongly worded statement in the catalogue for a Borduas retrospective exhibition in 1971, ‘L’automatisme québécois – celui de Borduas et de son groupe – n’a pas été seulement la transposition au Québec d’un surréalisme étranger. Il était le recommencement d’une culture d’ici.’ (‘En ce temps,’ 19; Quebecois automatism – that of Borduas and his group – was not merely the transposition of foreign surrealism to Quebec. It was the beginning of our new culture.)4 In the terms of the present study, this new culture does not involve the subordination of nature but its incorporation, especially through the notion of liberation. Indeed, in another powerful essay, ‘La ligne du risque,’ written in 1963 at the outset of the Quiet Revolution, Pierre Vadeboncoeur attributes the movement’s origins to Borduas, while highlighting the notion of freedom: ‘Le Canada-français moderne commence avec lui. Il nous a

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donné un enseignement capital qui nous manquait. Il a délié en nous la liberté.’ (187; Modern French-Canada begins with him. He gave us a capital lesson that we were missing. He released liberty within us.) Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Borduas unleashed ‘liberation,’ since, for him freedom is less an ideal to be sought than a goal to be constructed, as Vadeboncoeur goes on to explain: ‘il nous a fait la théorie et l’illustration de l’illimité!’ (190; he provided us with a theory and illustration of the unlimited!) Borduas’s own paintings, ‘illustrations’ of his freedom and of the unlimited power of imagination, often feature the tree, particularly in the landscapes of his early work, hardly surprising for a student of Ozias Leduc (chapter four). Not only did he copy Leduc’s Arbre de vie in 1927, but the tree is a central figure in several of his first non-representational (non-figuratif) oil paintings, including the well-known Les arbres dans la nuit from 1943 (plate 8). From a formal standpoint, the darkness of night is rendered by a black ground applied first over the entire canvas in broad strokes, then modulated with swathes of brown and purple. Set against this background stand two erect, tapered forms of light tone with protuberances forked upward, which appear tree-like to the spectator (aided by the title), much as they must have to Borduas (aided by visual memory). They are denuded and white, as if struck by lightning, recalling the tree in Leduc’s Le cumulus bleu, yet they remain steadfast, elegant, and luminous, creating a positive image against the seemingly negative background. Surrounding them are several unidentifiable yet suggestive geomorphic forms: the trees seem to stand on a circular platform, a pedestal or island isolated from the surrounding sea of darkness; to the right, closing the composition, is a blade-like vertical form, also of light tone, which may suggest another tree, itself bordered by a green band implanted with dark circles, which are matched by those on the ‘handle’ of another form with the air of a scythe, closing the top of the composition. The vertical ‘tree’ to the right leans towards the two others and nearly touches the upper arc of the blade, forming a sort of arch for the two ‘trees’ in the middle and for a set of yellow strokes whose formlessness and loose contours suggest the pent-up motion of charges of energy. Adjacent to the right form is a three-pronged figure whose flesh-like colour and digital protrusions suggest a hand, set immediately over a red square; both colours are picked up by a bent oval to the left, above which are two red biomorphic, lip-like ovals with dark centres; in the middle of the canvas, on each side of the tree are two white, luminous circular forms, which flank the central trees as if

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to illuminate them, or emanate from them, or dart between them from the darkness behind. The central forms themselves, apart from any objects they may denote, already have considerable suggestive power, given their verticality, tapering, position, solidity, pairing, light tonality, and duplication in the collateral forms, whose bright colours enliven the canvas. Despite their diversity the forms are harmonized by matching shapes, often in pairs, of similar colour, tone, size, and direction. The result is a unified composition that is positive and vibrant, even elating, despite the alien forms that resist interpretation, which, nonetheless, the spectator feels compelled to attempt. In a book on Borduas published the same year as this painting, Robert Élie’s assessment suits it well: ‘L’artiste se plaît parfois à lancer dans la nuit un bel objet qui n’a de réalité d’ordinaire qu’au grand jour. Ces objets peuvent servir de points de repère, de mesure de profondeur, mais le spectateur ne s’y arrête pas. Il pénètre dans un immense cercle vivant qui rayonne tout autour de l’objet transformé et c’est un merveilleux déploiement de formes et de couleurs, qui transforment ces objets en signes révélateurs tout animés par la nuit.’ (11–12; The artist often takes pleasure in launching into the night a beautiful object that would only appear real in broad daylight. These objects may serve as reference points, as depth soundings, but the spectator doesn’t stop there: he enters into an immense living circle radiating all around the transfigured object making for a marvellous deployment of shapes and colours that transform these objects into revelatory signs fully animated by the night.) Whether one can (or should) attempt to decode these ‘signs,’ to lend these ‘trees’ more precise meaning is a conjectural but potentially fruitful avenue, the exploration of which is encouraged by the title and by Borduas’s very artistry, as Marcel Saint-Pierre opines: ‘La promenade interprétative dans l’instance du non-verbal est sans relâche déplacée par la lecture. Telle est la conséquence à laquelle convie le geste de création: la connaissance sensible.’ (22; The interpretive processing of the non-verbal is constantly altered by reading. The consequence engendered by the creative gesture is thus: perceptible understanding.) This interpretative enterprise should be undertaken cautiously and entertain both multiple possibilities and fundamental contradictions, everpresent elements of Quebec writing and painting. One can then seek the common denominators and the striking exceptions that may point to traits of collective and individual identity. Borduas’s method of painting by instinct, without preconceived notions (‘intentions’) of subject, form, or composition, leads Gagnon to

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prefer a ‘structural’ rather than ‘iconographical’ approach to his works (Paul-Émile Borduas, 137). But given the painter’s key tenets – (1) that inner phenomena cannot be expressed without reference to the visible world; (2) that the artist’s accumulated techniques and knowledge allow him to translate these phenomena; (3) that inner phenomena like the dream often have recognizable figures; (4) that titles are added afterwards based on prior associations evoked by the forms; and (5) that the finished painting will contain and reveal psychic phenomena5 – the importance of the tree in Borduas’s intellectual and visual formation must be taken into account. Indeed, Gagnon himself turns to L’arbre de la science du bien et du mal, another Borduas painting of 1943, to interpret this one: ‘L’allusion biblique nous donne peut-être le sens de la nuit dans cette production de 1943. La nuit s’oppose au jour, comme le mal au bien … On pourrait ajouter du poids à cet argument en notant qu’au moins deux tableaux de la série ont quelquechose à voir avec le franchissement des interdits.’ (Paul-Émile Borduas, 155–6; The biblical allusion provides perhaps the meaning of night in the production of 1943. Night is opposed to day, like evil to good … One could add weight to this argument by noting that at least two paintings in the series have something to do with crossing forbidden barriers.) Yet further interpretive weight might be added by also considering Borduas’s copy of Leduc’s Arbre de la vie, where a sword descending from the heavens to forbid future access to Paradise may explain the inclusion of the bladelike forms and the raised hand in Les arbres dans la nuit. Furthermore, the trees here may well stand for ‘good and evil,’ as argued by Gagnon, but also for knowledge (‘science’) in the face of the ignorance suggested by the surrounding darkness, as well as for one’s natural origins. From one psychological standpoint, the erect white trees, round red forms with dark centres, and suspended blade might invite a symbolic (phallic, vaginal, castration) reading; by concentrating, rather, on broader structures or patterns, one can hypothesize a more general sense of repression and interdiction in the surrounding darkness, reinforced by the hand and blade, yet pierced by a desire for liberation or transgression represented by the trees and the yellow flashes of energy, which also suggest the primitive forces of life and create a certain harmony among all the seemingly disparate forms they appear to engender. If indeed, as Borduas states, this individual context also applies to social values, then, against a dark background recalling the repressive nature of Quebec society and prefiguring the impending ‘grande noirceur’ and ‘grande nuit’ of the Duplessis era, a ‘revolution-

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ary’ message of resistance, energy, liberation, solidarity, and productivity also emerges from the image. And, if the premises of this book hold true, so that painting and literature of the same era inform each other, then further interpretive layers may also be uncovered by examining the treatment of the tree as it occurs, for example, in the work of Borduas’s close friend, Claude Gauvreau, himself a signer of Refus global, whose very language, according to Gilles Marcotte, recalls that of a painter: ‘le mot comme un matériel brut, semblable à la couleur, au traits purement abstraits du peintre’ (Les temps, 68; the words like raw materials, similar to colour, to the purely abstract lines of the painter). Gauvreau: Les reflets de la nuit Some twenty years the junior of Borduas, Gauvreau first met him at an exhibition of the painter’s works in 1942, then became a regular visitor to his studio in the company of his brother Pierre, himself a painter of renown who would also sign Refus global. Well-versed in Freudian psychology, Gauvreau saw writing, like painting, as a matter of liberating repressed psychic energy, then interpreting its material manifestations. His succinct definition of art was ‘l’inscription d’un désir dans la matière’ (the inscription of desire in matter), to which he added that desire is ‘le besoin de la libido d’une satisfaction symbolique’ (‘Qu’est-ce que l’art,’ 157; the libido’s need for symbolic satisfaction). Gauvreau’s first ‘publishable work’ (according to his ‘Autobiographie,’ 11), was a ‘dramatic object’ titled Les reflets de la nuit, which dates from 1944; it is the first work in Les entrailles, a collection of all his dramatic work from 1944 to 1946, which was not published until 1956 in Sur fil métamorphose. The initial stage directions (not to mention the title) recall the setting in Borduas’s Les arbres dans la nuit, which the writer may well have seen in the painter’s studio: ‘Des arbres dans la nuit. Un ciel avec de grosses étoiles. Brumeux. Des éclairages violents et variés seront employés subitement pour mettre en relief les acteurs. Deux arbres s’inclinent avec effort comme attirés l’un vers l’autre. Leurs faîtes se touchent formant une arche. Par cette arche entre un personnage gigantesque l’air plutôt épouvantable qui doit absolument être maquillé violemment avec du rouge, du vert, du bleu, du blanc, surtout du noir.’ (19; Some trees, at night. Sky with huge stars. Foggy. Violent and varied flashes should be used to suddenly reveal the actors. Two trees lean painfully as if drawn to one another. Their tops touch, forming an arch.

Plate 1 Clarence Gagnon, Evening on the North Shore, 1924. Oil on canvas, 77 x 81.6 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo © NGC / Crépuscule sur la Côte-Nord, 1924. Huile sur toile, 77 x 81,6 cm. Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Photo © MBAC.

Plate 2 Thomas Davies. A View of the Montmorency Falls near Quebec, Taken in 1790, 1791. Watercolour over graphite on laid paper, 34.1 x 51.6 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Photo © NGC / Vue des chutes Montmorency près de Québec, prise en 1790, 1791. Aquarelle sur mine de plomb sur papier vergé, 34,1 x 51,6 cm. Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Photo © MBAC.

Plate 3 Joseph Légaré, Paysage au monument à Wolfe, vers 1845. Huile sur toile, 131,3 x 174,6 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1955.109. Photo: Patrick Altman /Landscape with Wolfe Monument, circa 1845. Oil on canvas, 131.3 x 174.6 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1955.109. Photo: Patrick Altman.

Plate 4 Cornelius Krieghoff, Québec vu de la pointe de Lévy, 1853. Huile sur toile, 36,6 x 54 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1984.18, achat grâce à une subvention du gouvernement du Canada en vertu de la Loi sur l’exportation et l’importation. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac / Quebec seen from the Pointe De Lévy, 1853. Oil on canvas, 36.6 x 54 cm. Musée national des beauxarts du Québec, 1984.18, purchased with a grant from the Government of Canada under the Cultural Property Export and Import Act. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac.

Plate 5 Joseph Azarie (Ozias) Leduc (Canadian 1864–1965). The Blue Cumulus, 1913. Oil on canvas, 92.1 x 61.6 cm. Purchased with funds from Friends of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. The Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Fredericton, NB / Le Cumulus Bleu, 1913. Huile sur toile, 92,1 x 61,2 cm. Achat grâce aux Amis de la Galerie d’art Beaverbrook. La Galerie d’art Beaverbrook. Fredericton, NB.

Plate 6 Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Après-midi d’avril, 1920. Huile sur toile, 80,8 x 100,7 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1934.591, achat 1920, restauration effectuée par le Centre de conservation du Québec. Photo: Patrick Altman / April Afternoon, 1920. Oil on canvas, 80.8 x 100.7 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1934.591, purchased 1920, conservation treatment by the Centre de conservation du Québec. Photo: Patrick Altman.

Plate 7 René Richard, Territoire de Menaud, vers 1979. Lithographie, 27,4 x 33,6 cm. Université Laval. Photo: Marc Robitaille. © Fondation René Richard / Menaud’s Territory, circa 1979. Lithograph, 27.4 x 33.6 cm. Université Laval. Photo: Marc Robitaille. © Fondation René Richard.

Plate 8 Paul-Émile Borduas, Trees in the Night, 1943. Oil on canvas, 49.7 x 58.2 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Bequest of Robert H. Hubbard, Ottawa, 1989. Photo © NGC. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SODRAC, Montreal/Les arbres dans la nuit, 1943. Huile sur toile, 49,7 x 58,2 cm. Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Legs de Robert H. Hubbard, Ottawa, 1989. Photo © MBAC. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SODRAC, Montreal.

Plate 9 Pellan, Alfred. Jardin vert, 1958. Huile et poudre cellulosique sur toile, 104,6 x 186,3 cm. Musée national des beaux-art du Québec, 1959.516. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SODRAC, Montreal / Green Garden, 1958. Oil and cellulose powder on canvas, 104.6x186.3 cm. Musée national des beaux-art du Québec, 1959.516. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SODRAC, Montreal.

Plate 10 Jean-Paul Riopelle. La montagne, 1966. Huile sur toile, 140 x 260 cm. Collection de Me Marc Bellemare. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SODRAC, Montreal / The Mountain, 1966. Oil on canvas, 140 x 260 cm. Courtesy of Me Marc Bellemare. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SODRAC, Montreal.

Plate 11 René Richard. Sans titre ou La montagne secrète, vers 1975. Huile sur panneau de fibre de bois, 15,5 x 23,4 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1989.162, legs Marcel Carbotte. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac. © Fondation René Richard /Untitled or La montagne secrète, circa 1975. Oil on fibreboard, 15.5 x 23.4 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1989.162, Marcel Carbotte Bequest. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac. © Fondation René Richard.

Plate 12 René Richard. La montagne de mes rêves, vers 1975. Dessin au crayon de couleur et stylo-feutre sur papier brun, 50,8 x 53,3 cm. Avec la permission du Dr Christian Tschanz. Photo: Brant Vanboening, Platform. © Fondation René Richard / The Mountain of My Dreams, circa 1975. Coloured pencil and felt-tipped pen drawing on brown paper, 50.8 x 53.3 cm. Courtesy of Dr Christian Tschanz. Photo: Brant Vanboening, Platform. © Fondation René Richard.

Plate 13 Raynald Leclerc. S’éclate la lumière. La rue Sainte-Anne, 2003. Huile sur toile, 38 x 18 pouces. Avec la permission de Sylvie Bourget, Galerie d’Art Internationale. Photo: Louis Charbonneau/Bursting with Light. Sainte-Anne Street, 2003. Oil on canvas, 38 x 18 inches. Courtesy of Sylvie Bourget, Galerie d’Art Internationale. Photo: Louis Charbonneau.

Plate 14 Bruno Côté. Rang Cap-aux-Corbeaux, vers 2000. Pochade, huile sur panneau de bois, 6 x 8 pouces. Avec la permission de Vincent Fortier, Galerie Vincent. Photo: Christian Bélanger / Cap-aux-Corbeaux Row, circa 2000. Sketch, oil on wood panel, 6 x 8 inches. Courtesy of Vincent Fortier, Galerie Vincent. Photo: Christian Bélanger.

Plate 15 Christian Bergeron. Village en hiver, 2010. Acrylique sur toile, 30 x 40 pouces. Avec la permission de Christine Marsan, Galerie Christian Bergeron. Photo: Steven Graetz, Studio Graetz / Village in Winter, 2010. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. Courtesy of Christine Marsan, Galerie Christian Bergeron. Photo: Steven Graetz, Studio Graetz.

Plate 16 Raynald Leclerc. Vue du ciel (Québec), 2010. Huile sur toile, 20 x 24 pouces. Avec la permission de Sylvie Bourget, Galerie d’Art Internationale. Photo: Louis Charbonneau/View from the Sky (Quebec City), 2010. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Sylvie Bourget, Galerie d’Art Internationale. Photo: Louis Charbonneau.

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Through this arch enters an enormous character, rather frightening to look at. He absolutely must be made up violently with red, green, blue, white, and especially black [20].)6 In short, visually Gauvreau has created, as André Bourassa puts it, ‘an infernal world where the tortured night of the soul is illuminated only by spectral light emanating from some murky deep’ (109), out of which emerges a phantasmal character, who introduces himself as the greatest of all poets, Frédéric Chir de Houppelande, his name itself replete with the sonority and playfulness characteristic of French surrealism. United with nature, especially its nocturnal creatures, this ‘frère du hibou’ (brother of the owl) with a voice that is ‘sœur du hibou’ (sister of the owl) and that affects ‘les cœurs de lianes rousses’ (the heart of rust-coloured lianas), has nonetheless lost the expressive powers that can release his desires: ‘Je voudrais porter à mes lèvres une larme de la nuit qui m’hallucine. Je suis halluciné, et je hurle et je hurle et les crépitements des mirages ne me répondent pas.’ (19; I want to bring to my lips a tear of the night that hallucinates me. I am moonstruck, and I howl and I howl and the cracklings of mirages do not reply [20].) At this moment of extreme frustration, underscored by the repetitive rhythm and intense imagery,7 the maiden Corvelle arrives on scene, not the muse that Frédéric hopes for, but herself seeking fulfilment through his words: ‘L’univers en rut me murmure dans ses frémissements des paroles bienaimées de Frédéric Chir de Houppelande.’ (20; The universe in rut murmurs beloved words to me from Frederick Chir de Houppelande [21].) Frédéric attempts to endow the trees with magical power – he ‘passant devant chacun des arbres de la forêt a fait le geste du semeur et les arbres à mesure qu’il les ensemence imaginairement s’illuminent de rouge comme s’il semait sur eux la couleur rouge’ (makes motions of sowing seeds, passing in front of each of the trees in the forest. As he pretends to broadcast seed on them, the trees light up with red as if he had sowed them with that colour). His powers seem to work their past magic, since voices now sing out from an illuminated forest reminiscent of the symbolic and synaesthetic forest of Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondances’: ‘Les voix de la forêt (venant des arbres illuminés de rouge) – Je chante la voix de Frédéric Chir de Houppelande qui a dit: “Je berce la jeune fille comme le lac berce le ciel.”’ (20; The Voices of the Forest: (Coming from the redlit trees.) I sing the voice of Frederick Chir de Houppelande, who said: ‘I rock the girl as the lake rocks the sky’ [21].) Yet the maiden’s desires remain unfulfilled, since her only response to the forest voices’ query of what she feels –‘Jeune fille, ne sens-tu rien?’ – is to ask the identity of a

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new character who, in a visual metaphor, hangs suspended from the moon: ‘Quel est le jeune homme qui tranche et retranche la forêt comme un balancier d’horloge?’ (20; Who is this young man who slices and slices again through the forest like a clock pendulum? [21])8 The response of the night voices is unequivocal: he is the new poet of the night and the forest – ‘Il est un nouveau Frédéric Chir de Houppelande’ – which causes the red lustre previously sown by Frédéric to disappear from the trees. Corvelle then addresses the new poet in terms that reveal the sense(s) of the term ‘reflets’ from the title: ‘Est-il vrai que de l’ineffable Frédéric Chir de Houppelande tu as glané un reflet? … fais de moi deux ailes qui te porteront au ciel, ente-moi au reflet de mon immortel idéal.’ (20–1; Is it true that you have gleaned a reflection from the ineffable Frederick Chir de Houppelande? … make of me two wings to carry you to heaven, graft me to the reflection of my immortal ideal [22].) Frédéric, the former master, as the names Frédéric and Chir (repeated incessantly and hypnotically) suggest, is now as old-fashioned as the ‘houppelande,’ a medieval gown that persists in clerical and academic garb;9 recognizing vocal defeat by bringing his hands to his throat, he reluctantly opens his cape and ‘de sa poitrine sort un rayon de couleur jaune qui monte vers les étoiles’ (21; from his chest comes a ray of light yellow in colour which rises towards the stars [22]). The ‘reflets’ or ‘rayons,’ then, are the streaks of libidinal energy that burst forth from the inner depths and potentially, occasionally, attain consciousness, form, and meaning through poetic expression.10 To Corvelle’s offer to carry him to the heavens on her wings, the mysterious new poet, whose unrecognizable name is Hurbur, responds categorically: ‘Je n’ai pas besoin des ailes, toutes les passerelles aux étoiles me sont soumises, mais tu peux venir avec moi. Je travaille, je travaille sans cesse.’ (21; I have no need for wings, every footbridge to the stars is at my command, but you can come with me. I work, I work endlessly [22].) The new poet needs no exterior muse, since his inspiration comes from within, coaxed out by hard work and constant struggle. Corvelle, now illuminated in green light, suggesting life, joins Hurbur, and together they rise into the heavens as if on a staircase or ladder. At the height of their ascent, Hurbur proclaims ‘J’ai soif’ and quenches his thirst by drinking from a star, yet another source of light. At that point, Frédéric silently and ‘religiously’ lies down on the stage, his outstretched arms crossed above his head, while from behind a passing cloud, Corvelle utters a gasp, like that of a person falling asleep. With the dissipation of the cloud,

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Hurbur reappears, holding aloft the inert, bloodied body of Corvelle, which he then brings back to stage level and deposits, next to the supine Frédéric. As dawn breaks, Hurbur sniffs the fresh air and proclaims: ‘La nuit prend fin’ (22; The night is ending [23]), as is the play. Clearly the psychodrama being staged by Gauvreau is that of creativity itself, the releasing and realization of the creative impulse in the work of art: first, in the general sense that new feelings require new approaches and thus new artists; second, in the individual sense of the struggle inherent in that approach to liberate the natural forces within and exteriorize (express) them on the canvas, page, or stage.11 Less apparent is the role of death in the creative process and product, a subject treated in depth by Jean-Pierre Denis, who notes that ‘la mort traverse en effet l’œuvre gauvrienne de part en part. Elle est ce qui organise récits comme fantasmes, ce qui donne force au désir, ce qui institue, déclenche la quête.’ (487; in fact, death runs through Gauvreau’s work from one end to the other. It’s what organizes tales as phantasms, what gives force to desire, what institutes, activates the quest.)12 Death, which defines the state of women (486), especially in a repressive society like Quebec forced, in effect, to perpetually confront its own death (490), defines the very condition of the poet: ‘Tout poète est confronté à la mort dès qu’il se livre au langage et mesure sa disparition dans le tracé des mots qui avancent, comme malgré lui.’ (486; Every poet is confronted by death as soon as he surrenders to language and measures his disappearance in the line of words that advance, as if despite him.) Furthermore, Gauvreau’s treatment of the theme of trees in the night, with the addition of human figures, gestures, and words, affords us yet another perspective from which to explore the possible meanings in Borduas’s cryptic canvas, Les arbres dans la nuit: the metacritical.13 The trees, for example, might be seen as psychic portals through which the creative energy of the unconscious can pass before exploding into luminous spots, which then assume rudimentary forms – however amorphous, biomorphic, or geomorphic – on the canvas. Darkness itself is not only threatening but also nourishing, since it must be confronted like the unconscious itself, despite the restrictions of previous art or the taboos of the church and society.14 Finally, the hand, perhaps the most identifiably human form on the canvas, may be read less as an indicator of interdiction than as a synecdoche for the artist (part for the whole) and a metonymy of the artistic process (cause for effect). This interpretative avenue then takes its place alongside, or better superimposed onto, the other readings that lend the canvas its complex layers of latent meaning.

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Moreover, the appearance of the tree in the works of Borduas and Gauvreau can also be compared with its prominence in previous works, such as those of Conan and Leduc (see chapter four), which also depict the landscape as a reflection of the inner world. In the previous cases, the tree stands for specific psychic phenomena – destructive forces inherent in material reality and hence the desire for spirituality – represented by real-seeming figurative objects with clearly symbolic meanings. In the case of Borduas and Gauvreau, however, the trees are part of a dynamic pattern inherent in the unconscious whose elusive nature can be expressed only ‘automatically’ and non-representationally. Further familiar icons reappear, their treatment differing radically from earlier examples as we move from the forties into the fifties and then into the sixties. By examining them, we can attempt to answer Axel Maugey’s pertinent (albeit rhetorical) question: ‘L’apparition, depuis la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, d’une poésie universelle, annonce-t-elle la fin de l’isolement d’une petite collectivité francophone soucieuse de participer à l’histoire mondiale?’ (7; Does the appearance of a universally oriented poetry since the Second World War announce the end of isolation for a small francophone collectivity anxious to participate in global history?) Pellan and Giguère: The Garden Although Borduas and his contemporary Alfred Pellan differed on precise issues beginning with Pellan’s ‘triumphant’ return from France in 1940 and culminating with the latter’s signing of the manifesto Prismes d’yeux in 1948, which Borduas saw as a repudiation of the principles outlined that same year in Refus global, Pellan remained committed to individual and aesthetic liberation.15 Like Borduas, Pellan saw close ties between painting and literature and himself illustrated the innovative poet Alain Grandbois’s Les îles de la nuit in 1944. Since these illustrations have been amply treated,16 I turn, rather, to what Germain Lefebvre identifies as ‘an important milestone in Pellan’s work’ (Pellan, 150),17 a series of paintings involving that most typical of all Quebec icons, the garden. Indeed, the subject itself, being a mixture of nature and culture, already suggests a major difference between the studied, tempered manner of Pellan and the automatist approach to the unbridling of natural forces characteristic of Borduas and the automatists. In 1958, Pellan did six paintings on the theme of the garden (Jardin), each involving a different colour of the spectrum – bleu, jaune, rouge, mauve, orange, and vert – applied in a variety of ways, as Robert Bernier

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explains: ‘Sa conception artistique est unique et fait appel à différents matériaux et objets inusités: des peignes, des séringues qu’utilisent les pâtissiers et, comme matière le Polyfilla et le tabac. Certains tableaux prennent davantage de distance par rapport à la réalité physique. Ainsi, dans Jardin vert … on retrouve plutôt un univers poètique où formes et matières font jaillir une nature microscopique, pleine de vitalité.’ (Un siècle, 180–1; His artistic conception is unique and involves different unusual materials and objects: combs, pastry tubes and, for material, Polyfilla and tobacco. Some paintings are more removed from physical reality. Thus, in Jardin vert … one finds rather a poetic universe where forms and matter bring forth a microscopic nature, full of vitality.) In Jardin vert (plate 9), the spectator seems to assume a bird’s-eye perspective looking down at the ‘garden’ since the vertical lines in the middle do not converge but run straight into the upper horizontal ones, thus negating the linear conventions that would imply perspective and depth. At the same time, several of the objects seem to have trailing vertical lines or ‘stems’ and thus lie flat on the surface rather than project themselves ‘upward’ towards the hypothetical viewer, further reinforcing the notion of the canvas as a two-dimensional plane. The only depth or relief in this painting comes from the texture of the paint itself along with whatever substances Pellan has contrived to mix with it and whatever implements he has used to apply it. Buchanan calls the gardens ‘pure essays on the free-flowing decoration of a panel, in which everything is on the surface and there are no hidden meanings anywhere’ (13), and yet, at the same time, they seem to invite deeper readings. At first glance, despite Michel Nadeau’s contention that ‘Pellan abandonne toute référence à l’espace paysagiste’ (32; Pellan abandons all reference to landscape space), the painting seems indeed to suggest a garden, French style at that, with its uniform clusters or ‘beds’ of similar colours and shapes or ‘species,’ arranged somewhat symmetrically over the rectangular surface of the canvas or ‘garden.’ Two central clusters, the left one circular, the right one rectilinear, each with objects of different size and number, close the composition at the bottom, while the two that flank them close the left and right lower sides. The lines lying behind the right central cluster thrust upward like columns only to confront rows of horizontal lines that close the top, while the clusters of objects on each side of them close off the upper sides. Moreover, emanating from the top left cluster are a series of microbe-like projectiles that seem to diminish and mutate as they approach the top right cluster, which then seems to explode into fragments. As Lefebvre puts it in

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assessing the series, ‘An abundant and generous seed feeds the most extraordinary plantations proliferating from the most fertile of soils. The vigour, the power of germination of these flowers and plants is such that they reach for the nourishing sun with as much brilliance as the most sparkling, the most baroque, the most rococo fireworks’ (‘Introduction,’ 44). The microorganic, shape-shifting appearance of some of the components, along with the uniform grid of cell-like blocks to the lower right of the painting, suggest yet another analogy for the painting, reinforced by the rectangle of the canvas: that of a microscope slide showing slices of plant and animal life seen in cross section, as Bernier’s use of ‘microscopique’ suggests. Even more, given the dynamic, organic morphing of shapes, the painting seems like a living ‘culture,’ cultivated in a rectangular dish, displaying the very building blocks of life and the vital forces infusing them. In this sense Pellan can be said to offer us a ‘microcosmic’ vision of life, at once different from yet akin in scope to the ‘cosmic’ vision of Borduas, both visions leading us away from finite reality towards the infinite depths or expanses of the imagination.18 From this ‘microscopic’ perspective the garden may be further read metacritically as a metaphor for Pellan’s approach to art, where painting, like an organism, is reduced to its most basic elements – building blocks and forces – in this case: colour, rendered material by paint and the substances mixed with it to lend it texture and form (albeit shifting), its liberal application engendering other forms to create an ‘organic’ whole of tremendous vitality; and line, underpinning the scattered elements, like ligaments or filaments joining various clusters into networks to give them near geometric structure. Indeed, Lefebvre uses botanical vocabulary to describe both Pellan’s approach to the act of painting – ‘The painter selects a portion of the soil and concentrates on the material, He examines it, turns it tenderly and it becomes unctuous, palpitating and fertile’ (Pellan, 151) – and Pellan’s approach to creation and creativity in general: ‘This is how the great work of the painter is carried out in all the complexity and unity of a living organism where the chains of cells regenerate indefinitely in the tissues as a result of the assimilation of essential nourishment into a vital fluid which assures the growth and proper functioning of all the organs … The organs, which here are called line, colour, matter’ (‘Introduction,’ 47). Pellan’s technique, based on ‘transformation and reconstruction,’ according to Buchanan (4), is more studied and self-conscious than that of Borduas, but every bit as free and liberating (for the work, the artist,

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and the spectator), every bit as suggestive of creation and creativity, and every bit as linked to literature. Pellan acknowledges the role of poetry in his own work, while paying homage to his friend the poet and painter Roland Giguère: ‘La poésie n’est pas exclue de mes préoccupations. Loin de là, je l’ai toujours considérée comme un élément important de la peinture. Pour ma part, j’ai tenté de créer un monde poétique par le truchement des moyens dont je disposais, c’est-à-dire, le dessin, la couleur, l’imagination. Giguère est doublement poète: il est poète de l’expression verbale, il est également poète de l’expression picturale.’ (137; Poetry is not excluded from my preoccupations. Far from that, I have always considered it as an important element of my painting. As for myself, I’ve tried to create a poetic world through the intermediary of the means at my disposal, that is, line, colour, imagination. Giguère is doubly poetic: he’s a poet with verbal expression; he’s equally a poet with pictorial expression.)19 Pellan’s statement provides not only confirmation of the main premise of this book – the intimate relationship between literature and painting in Quebec – but also a ready transition into the poetry of Roland Giguère, who founded the forward-looking Éditions Erta in 1949, through which he published most of his work in the fifties,20 a period he describes with vivid fondness and in familiar terms of darkness and light: ‘Je me souviens des années ’50 comme d’un moment d’effervescence extraordinaire, il y avait quelque chose de clandestin dans ces activités que menaient alors quelques poètes isolés. C’était, on le sait, la Grande Noirceur. Nous étions un peu comme des taupes qui creusaient un tunnel vers la lumière.’ (‘À propos,’ 164–5; I remember the fifties as a moment of extraordinary effervescence; there was something clandestine in the activities undertaken then by several isolated poets. It was, we know, the time of Great Darkness. We were a bit like moles digging a tunnel towards the light.) For Giguère, like Pellan, the garden is a central theme that embodies his overall vision of life and art, a repository of light at the end of the tunnel.21 In ‘L’ombre des jardins’ (1956), the garden suggests the potentials of life that are often left in the dark, neglected by the gardener: Le fléau erre dans le jardin pendant que la jardinière fait sa nuit. Regarde les saisons de santé, les chemins d’abandon, les eaux heureuses, regarde l’osier de ta vie qui tresse un panier de fruits. Regarde et ne vois pas, dors et n’entends pas. Des mantes religieuses meurent autour des lampes, Ce que la jardinière ne voit pas, le jardin le reflète.

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[Disaster wanders through the garden while the gardener retires for the night. Look at the healthy seasons, the deserted paths, the happy waters; look at the willow of your life, which weaves a basket of fruit. Look and see not, sleep and hear not. / Praying mantises die around lamps, / What the gardener doesn’t see, the garden reflects.]

Tended by day, the garden – a symbol of life forces (‘saisons de santé’), freedom (‘abandon’), happiness (‘eaux heureuses’), creative activity (‘tresse’), and productivity (‘un panier de fruits’) – lies unseen and unheard by the gardener, who, while conscious by day, remains insensitive to the mysteries of the night (‘la jardinière fait sa nuit’), which leads to disaster and destruction (‘le fléau erre’). The poet chides the gardener – any individual who neglects his or her creative potential (‘regarde et ne vois pas, dors et n’entends pas’) – while remaining convinced that the garden will reveal its secrets (‘le jardin le reflète’), if only the poet can decipher, release, and represent them, a conviction suggested in the poem by the verse ‘Des mantes religieuses meurent autour des lampes,’ where the imagery seems to free itself from the otherwise expository verses to achieve expressivity, albeit of a negative nature, since the praying mantises (suggesting the flight into spirituality) die around the lamps, not only those of daylight, but the light that the poet seeks to illuminate the night. As Marcotte notes of Giguère’s early works, the poet is torn between ‘l’espoir de la lumière et la sombre violence du feu’ (Le temps, 77; the hope of light and the sombre violence of fire). In a key segment of ‘Histoire naturelle’ of the following year (1957), Giguère seems better armed to produce the light that had failed: dans les jardins suspendus une parade de feu l’éclair en tête célèbre l’arrivée de la cendre on met aux fleurs des couronnes de braise qu’elles portent comme des reines22 [in the hanging gardens a parade of fire / led by lightning celebrates the arrival of the ashes / onto the flowers are put crowns of embers / which they wear like queens]

Here the gardens have already transcended material reality (‘suspendus’) and have emerged from the darkness to become a spectacle of fire (‘parade de feu’). And, although led by lightning (‘l’éclair’), which can disappear in a flash, the parade bears cinders (‘cendre’), remnants of consumed matter that nonetheless continue to glow with light and

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have the potential to bear further fire, as they do in the next verse when they produce embers (‘braise’) that crown the flowers in a regal way, surpassing everyday reality by artistic endowment: culture enhances nature, and fire becomes an emblem of poetry itself. If Claude Gauvreau can be called ‘un pur poète de la nuit’ (a pure poet of the night), then ‘la parole de Roland Giguère est flamme. Elle en a la rapidité, la puissance de dévastation et le pouvoir d’éclairer; flamme obscure et flamme claire.’ (Roland Giguère’s language is flame. It has the same devastating force and power to illuminate; dark flame and light flame.)23 Paul Chamberland, himself a poet of the same generation, includes Giguère among a group of ‘foundation’ poets, and although his discussion does not include the poems above, it serves as an apt explanation of the significance of the garden and its position in relation to ‘place’ and ‘space’: ‘the insistent return to things that are elemental, basic, and earth-related, so that the resultant enracination can bring fertility … the search here is for a central place, the “ultimate setting” that is the only location worthy of the act of foundation. By virtue of its position, the central place dominates the space around it: to be in it is to be able to participate in the world, to plunge into the stream of universal life. The time of origin opens up vast new spaces’ (127). Unlike the garden in early works, where it tended to represent a paradise – nation, family, or individual – lost and thus an entity to be regained, and unlike the garden in Angéline de Montbrun, which was at first a repository of emotions and memories, then a symbol of their waning and destruction, and finally an indicator that the only paradise is a spiritual one, the garden for Giguère and Pellan is one to be ‘cultivated,’ constructed – on the page or canvas – where it then stands for the victory of the creator over physical, political, and personal loss. Far from the closed place marking a regression and retreat from surrounding space, the garden has become a place of ‘foundation,’ ‘cultivation,’ opening up new spaces. As Giguère proclaims in ‘Paysage dépaysé’ (landscape lost) from Les armes blanches (1954), dedicated to his fellow painters, since the landscape was no longer the same (‘le paysage n’etait plus le même’) and had lost its beauty and meaning, it was time to redo the landscape (‘le paysage était à refaire’), be it physical, artistic, or political (the homophonic link between ‘paysage’ and ‘pays’ is hard to ignore, especially for Giguère, as the poem’s title suggests).24 As Maugey puts it, ‘le poète est alors en mesure d’opposer à ce monde infernal la vision d’un monde à reconstruire’ (151; the poet is thus in a position to oppose this infernal vision with a world to be constructed). Like the garden within it, the

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landscape for the artists of the fifties was in the making. In the sixties, during the Quiet Revolution, it begins to take shape, and among its icons are the familiar ones of the river and the mountain. Gatien Lapointe and Jean-Paul Riopelle: The River and the Mountain The 1960s represent a period of political, economic, and cultural renewal in Quebec, an era of unprecedented reconstruction in government, public utilities, and the arts, beginning with the Quiet Revolution and culminating with the awakening of an international spirit symbolized by Expo 67 (see Bernier, Un siècle, 207). The resultant feeling of national pride is reflected in a profusion of visual and verbal works of art, marked, perhaps more than coincidentally, by a return to a more representational approach that nonetheless bears the distinct traces of the liberation brought to light by more non-figurative predecessors.25 Of the poems of this decade, Mailhot and Nepveu find Gatien Lapointe’s Ode au Saint-Laurent, published in 1963, to be the most typical, not only in elevating language to a sovereign and foundational status, but also in representing ‘la poésie du pays,’ which affirms and renews national identity, as does the work of Gaston Miron and Paul Chamberland (37). The Ode au Saint-Laurent is a hymn of epic dimensions – 493 verses, unrhymed but quite regular in rhythm, generally grouped into stanzas of 8 verses, divided into 7 cantos of unequal length, spread over 26 pages in the original edition (cited here). In fits and starts, abrupt halts followed by repetitions and renewals, the poem moves inexorably forward like the river towards the sea, tracing the simultaneous birth of the man, the poet, the poem, and the country, all from the origins of the river itself (named only in the title). Massive like the Saint Lawrence, the poem has many themes or currents, only one of which, the river itself, will be tracked here.26 After stating at the start his intention to describe the birth of both man and poet, the narrator’s repeated use of the first-person pronoun clearly situates the narrative as one of identity: Ma langue est d’Amérique Je suis né de ce paysage J’ai pris souffle dans le limon du fleuve Je suis la terre et je suis la parole (65)27

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[My language is that of America / I was born from this landscape / I took my breath from the river’s silt / I am earth, and I am expression]

Here one notes the convergence of language (‘langue’), landscape (‘paysage’), land (‘terre’), man (‘je’), and message (‘parole’), all stemming from the river (‘limon du fleuve’), a conflation reinforced throughout the poem by frequent use of metaphor and personification.28 As Jacques Paquin states, ‘Délaissant la forme blasonnante de l’éloge du pays à travers sa cartographie, Gatien Lapointe substitue … celle du corps sujet. Sont ainsi favorisées les formules (au sens rimbaldien du terme) qui traduisent l’immédiateté de l’expérience entre le corps et le monde.’ (211; Abandoning the blazon form of praising the country through its cartography, Lapointe substitutes a geography of the speaking body. Thus favoured are formulas (in the Rimbaldian sense) that translate the immediacy of the experience between the body and the world.) Indeed, Lapointe’s imagery often recalls that of Rimbaud’s Bâteau ivre, although, rather than the past perfect of a failed adventure, here the tense is that of the present marching confidently towards the future, much as in Paul Éluard’s Liberté, and much like the river (‘Je suivrai la marche du fleuve,’ 67; I’ll follow the river’s flow).29 It is also clear that, unlike Éluard, writing in occupied France and set on recovering in the future the remnants and icons of past freedom lost, Lapointe is just as determined to construct a new identity in the present (‘Et c’est aujourd’hui qu’il me faut construire,’ 67; And it is today that I will myself construct), an identity that is both personal and collective (‘C’est de l’homme désormais qu’il s’agit,’ 67; It is henceforth about man). As Joseph Bonenfant proclaims, in an excellent reading of the poem, ‘Le poète enferme l’identité des choses dans ses mots. Dans le cas de Gatien Lapointe, on trouve aussi dans ses mots l’identité de celui qui parle. De là à ce que le lecteur éprouve lui aussi l’identité, et la sienne propre, il n’y a aucun espace.’ (250; The poet encloses the identity of things in his words. In the case of Lapointe, one also finds in his words the identity of the speaker. From there, to the reader also finding his own identity, there is no distance.) In the second canto, the imagery suggests that man and river form a single entity: ‘Fleuve dont les flots m’entraînent m’enchaînent / J’apprendrai la phrase âpre et belle de tes rives’ (68; River whose waves carry me capture me / I will learn the bitter and beautiful sentence of your banks). Although the river’s waves, captured by alliteration (‘fleuve … flots’), rhymed repetition (‘m’entraînent ... m’enchaînent’),

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and coincidence of verse and syntax, propel, even compel, the narrator, the poet also alludes to and explains the principles of his versification, and once he has learned the vocabulary of the river and the syntax of its banks (‘la phrase’), it is he, the poet, who reinvents and renews the landscape for the future (‘j’invente un paysage pour chaque âge’; I invent a landscape for each age), invention underscored by interior rhyme (‘-age … âge’). By transcending the past to form the future (‘J’éclaire mon passé j’affirme l’avenir’; I illuminate my past I affirm my future) the poet constructs a modern, multiple identity (‘Multiple et nouveau parmi le soleil’; Multiple and new under the sun) through his language, reinvigorated by the river: ‘Je descends sur la langue chaude et verte du fleuve’ (I descend on the river’s warm, green language). For Lapointe, the poet’s struggle for identity is more than just an emblem and thus a model for others, it must be forged by a direct link with humanity: ‘Ma maison fait face à tous les pays / Et toutes mes tables seront complètes / Je vous nomme et je vous invite’ (72; My house turns towards all countries / And all my tables will be full / I name you and I invite you). The use of the home, not as a personal refuge, but as a hosting place, not just for one nation but for those of all countries, has a multinational flavour that begins to emerge in the art of Quebec30 and will find perhaps its full expression in Gilles Vigneault’s ‘Mon pays’ (chapter ten). The following verses suggest, however, that before reaching out to humanity on an international scope, the French Canadian must find and affirm himself on a national plane, and the imagery reattains geographic specificity: ‘Ô mes amis de neige et de grand vent / … Nous existons dans un geste instinctif / Naîtrons-nous dans une parole’ (73; Oh my friends of snow and high winds / … We exist by instinctive gesture / Will we be born in language). In fact, what has formerly been feeling (‘instinctif’) must be understood and articulated to achieve rebirth (‘naîtrons’), and it is precisely the role of the poet (‘dans une parole’) to construct the national identity in order to accomplish that rebirth. The fourth canto, the longest so far, begins by defining the poet’s role in rebirth: ‘D’abord je te baptiserai dans l’eau du fleuve / Et je te donne un nom d’arbre très clair’ (75; First I will baptize you in the river’s water / And I give you a very clear name like a tree’s). The poet not only cleanses the land in the waters of the river, he seeks to name it, to define its identity while remaining faithful to its roots (‘un nom d’arbre’). It is precisely the question of identity, of finding a name, that launches the poet on a furious quest, sustained by hope but beset by doubt and the confusion of all beginnings: ‘J’ai toute la confusion d’un

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fleuve qui s’éveille’ (76; I have all the confusion of a river awakening). Through language reinvigorated by the river’s silt (‘limon’), the poet is able to transcend the river as a source of inspiration to become the river, flowing irrevocably out to sea – ‘Je suis une source en marche vers la mer / Et la mer remonte en moi comme un fleuve’ (I am a spring flowing towards the sea / And the sea rises in me like a river). The sea, the vast transnational waters lying beyond the land-bound river, where the poet’s nation, formerly turned back on itself, turns out towards the world – ‘Mon pays chante dans toutes les langues / Je vois le monde entier dans un visage / Je pèse dans un mot le poids du monde’ (78–9; My country sings in all languages / I see the entire world in a face / I weigh in a word the weight of the world) – a determined expansion marked by the alliteration of v’s, p’s, and m’s. This movement of expansion seems to again foster a contraction back towards the centre, as the poet reorients his country, himself, and his work through the river (‘Dans mon pays il y a un grand fleuve,’ 79; In my country there is a great river), which again inspires his language to become a universal hymn – ‘Je dis les eaux … Je dis ces mots … Je lancerai un chant dans l’univers / Je dispose couleurs et formes / J’unis et j’agrandis j’abrège et je dénude / Je me construis un abri ici-bas’ (I say the waters … I say these words … I’ll cast a song into the universe / I make use of colours and shapes / I unite and I enlarge I shorten and I strip / I construct myself a shelter here below). The repeated allusions to communication (‘je dis’), to poetry (‘un chant’), to the poet’s manipulation of language (‘Je dispose,’ ‘J’unis,’ ‘j’agrandis,’ ‘j’abrège,’ ‘je dénude’), and to the poem itself as a sheltered place (‘un arbi’), which the poet has not regained but constructed by constructing himself (‘Je me construis’), mark these verses as the most intense metacritical moment in the poem, especially falling as they do at the end of this canto. But what are these words (‘ces mots’), this name (‘ce nom’) that the poet alludes to throughout this canto, and that he continues to seek in the short canto five and well into the next, the poem’s longest at eight pages – ‘En secret j’écoute bouger le nom nouveau’ (81; In secret I listen to the stirring of the new name)? Again it becomes clear that if he is to find the name, to define identity, he must construct it: ‘Et j’ai dessein d’organiser / Ordonner afin de ne pas mourir’ (81; I intend to organize / To order so as not to die). And once again it is nature, in the form of the river, that summons him – ‘Et le haut fleuve me prit par la main’ (82; And the high river took me by the hand). From its sludge (‘vase’), he creates a song – ‘Je chante le plein air de l’homme / J’augure la neuve

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harmonie’ (84; I sing the open air of man / I foretell the new harmony) – which becomes, more than his own place, one for all mankind: ‘J’en ferai des maisons pour abriter les hommes / Et des lettres pour dire leur amour / J’en ferai un chant à visage d’homme’ (I will make homes to shelter men / And letters to tell of their love / I will make a song with a human face). This song is, no doubt, the very hymn that we are raptly reading, yet again crucial words are missing, for the reader as earlier for the poet (‘Deux mots ont soudain changé sur ses lèvres,’ 85; Two words suddenly changed on his lips); but what are these words? As is so often the case in the literature and painting of Quebec, the answer will ultimately stem from the landscape – ‘J’ouvre le premier paysage’ (86; I open the first landscape). Through a conscious creative effort, not an intuitive burst, light is pulled out from the darkness and formed into a rainbow that reaches across the seas that separate continents: ‘J’entraîne au jour tout ce qui est nocturne / J’ajuste l’arc-en-ciel sur la cuisse des mers / Ma main rêve d’un continent à l’autre’ (87; I drag everything nocturnal into daylight / I adjust the rainbow on the thighs of the seas / My hand dreams from one continent to the other). As he scans the vast space he has just opened up, in search of a remote answer (‘Le bras en visière sur l’horizon / Je guette un très lointain secret’; Shading my eye turned towards the horizon / I look out for a faraway secret), he spots nearby the promised place (‘une maison de terre et de bois’; a house of earth and wood), the source of what he has already learned and the answer to the secret he seeks (‘Tout de que j’ai appris me vient d’ici / Je retrouve ici mes premières images,’ 88; All I have learned comes from here / Here I find my earliest images). Beginning with the repeated vague locative adverbs (‘ici’), the verses move towards a noun – ‘la première ville’ (the first city) – and then to a proper noun, a name: ‘Québec rose et gris au milieu du fleuve’ (Quebec pink and grey in the middle of the river). Indeed, by exploiting the temporality inherent in the text, the verses move from impression to identification; that is, the syntax mimics the process of defining identity. And it does not stop there. Whereas previous descriptions of the city, from Cartier’s and Champlain’s to Garneau’s and Chauvreau’s, culminate in the apparition of the city, Stadaconé or Quebec, Lapointe sees the river, rather, as a starting point for a broader vision: ‘Chaque route jette en toi un reflet du monde … C’est le fleuve qui revient d’océan chaque soir / Et c’est l’océan qui tremble dans chaque regard’ (Each route casts in you a reflection of the world … It’s the river that returns each evening from the ocean / And it’s the ocean that trembles in each gaze). This broad

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‘paysage’ is no less than a ‘pays,’ and one connected with the world at that; it is ‘Le Québec’ more than just the city of Quebec, and more than just the Province of Quebec. Chamberland is generally credited with titling a work with the name that will come to designate the nation in Terre-Québec in 1964, but certainly the Ode au Saint-Laurent is a clear predecessor. The power of the word, of naming, of identifying, of reinvigorating and solidifying a society is celebrated in the final short canto: ‘La parole de l’homme est ma seule présence / Je réduis la distance entre chaque être’ (89; The language of man is my sole presence / I reduce the distance between each being). The poem ends, as it began, with the linking of poet, language, and country through the river, but now, instead of being saddled with uncertainty, all are endowed with a vision of the future: Je prends pied sur une terre que j’aime L’Amérique est ma langue ma patrie… Tout est plus loin chaque matin plus haut Le flot du fleuve dessine une mer J’avance face à l’horizon Je reconnais ma maison à l’odeur des fleurs Il fait clair et beau sur la terre Ne fera-t-il jamais jour dans le cœur des hommes? [I take a foothold on the land I love / America is my language my country / Everything is farther each morning higher / The river’s ebb and flow conjures up a sea / I go forward facing the horizon / I recognize my home from the smell of flowers / It’s bright and beautiful on earth / Will daylight never pierce the hearts of men?]

Once again the land (‘ma patrie’) and landscape (‘dessine’) are seen as a combination of nature (‘fleuve’) and culture (‘langue’), space (‘horizon’) and place (‘ma maison’),31 but with an air of personal confidence (‘j’avance’) and concern for the collectivity (‘le cœur des hommes’) that characterizes the Quiet Revolution of the sixties and emerges also in the work of Jean-Paul Riopelle. Although he began with the group of automatists in the forties and changed his approach frequently, Riopelle undertook a return to more figurative painting in the sixties, but in a way that Brunet-Weinmann has termed ‘refiguration’ (54), a remaking of reality in terms of the painter’s feelings. When asked whether his painting, whatever the period, could be termed ‘abstract,’ Riopelle replied: ‘My approach is the

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exact opposite. I don’t take anything from Nature, I move into Nature.’32 His La montagne of 1966 (plate 10) is typical of this approach and this period. Here, the title is hardly necessary to identify the main subject, a mountain face stretching from one end of the horizon line to the other and rising in conic form near the centre to dominate the top third of the canvas, while the bottom two-thirds appears as a network of interlocking triangular shapes, far less identifiable in relation to the objective world. This is indeed less a representation than a reconfiguration of reality in terms of the artist’s vision and technique. Robert Bernier sees the painting as an artistic citation, an allusion to Cézanne (La peinture, 345), and indeed the mountain top, cut off here by the top of the canvas, resembles the squared off summit of Cézanne’s depictions of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire near Aix-en-Provence. From this starting point one might read the lower triangular forms as a series of different coloured fields or even as the separate parts of the broken facade of the Bibemus Quarry, which often figures in Cézanne’s canvasses. The central white form thrusting upward could then be read as the lone pine tree that Cézanne often uses as a vertical line to offset the horizontal ones of the horizon and facade, a reading pursued by Pierre Schneider: ‘La porte ouverte à toute volée par l’arbre traînant des lambeaux de terre, piqué des éclats du jour … sur le seuil où plus d’un trébuche et se fige est le signe même du prodigieux élan qui parcourt cette oeuvre’ (Riopelle, signes, 135; The door opened wide by the tree, pulling along scraps of earth and pricked with splinters of daylight … on whose threshold more than one stumbles and stops is the very sign of the prodigious vigour that flows through this work). Riopelle’s characteristic mosaic-like strokes33 and the repetition of triangles might then suggest geometric forms like those to which Cézanne reduced the surface of reality on the canvas, and yet, as Schneider points out of Riopelle’s art, even the geometric figures found on certain canvases don’t have the solidity and stability usually associated with them (‘Peintures,’ 7–8). Indeed, in addition to a ‘geometric’ reading, one might propose a ‘geologic’ one whereby Riopelle is depicting not only the exterior of the mountain’s form, seen from afar, but also at the same time the inner forms of the mountain, seen from within. In essence, he has turned the mountain inside out. In this sense, the triangular masses are akin to the tectonic plates from which some mountains are formed, while the mosaic blocks suggest the accretion of rock that forms others, and the slender central form might then be read as the upward thrust of volcanic lava that characterizes yet a third type of mountain building. Indeed,

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all of these component forms seem to be endowed with a type of energy and dynamic movement that distinguish Riopelle from his French ancestor, while the contradictory perspectives, from afar and from within, destabilize the space of the canvas to make it at once objective and subjective, an effect Riopelle often creates. The painter, like the poet for Giguère, can be described as ‘un sismographe qui enregistre les tremblements d’être, il va de soi qu’il est sensible non seulement à ses petits mouvements intérieurs mais aussi aux grands glissements extérieurs’ (‘À propos,’ 167; a seismograph recording human quakes, it goes without saying that it’s sensitive not only to minor interior tremors but also to major exterior shifts). Yet here, rather than bear witness to the violent seismic eruptions of earthquakes, we sense the constructive forces that transform rather than destroy nature; as Jacques Lassaigne puts it, ‘from this volcano emerge materials that are meticulously selected, colours whose burning power does nothing to diminish their purity, magical stones.’34 Riopelle’s vision lies somewhere between the ‘cosmic’ of Borduas and the ‘microcosmic’ of Pellan, and may well, in this case, be called ‘cosmological’ according to Yves Michaud, in that Riopelle’s art embodies ‘metamorphoses of form … transformations of matter.’35 And, as with his predecessors, the general term describing his vision also applies to the artist’s approach to paint and painting, making it auto-representational if not representational. For Riopelle, painting is less studied than for Pellan (or Cézanne), and less ‘sporadic’ than for Borduas, but rather more ‘gestural,’ hence the dynamic movements and lines of force within the mosaic pattern. As Michel Waldberg puts it, ‘Nature was conceived not as a spectacle, but as a principle of creation. Things were seen, not in the illusion of their fixedness, but in their perpetual engenderment’ (51). For Riopelle, a painting, like a mountain, is also formed by the collision of masses, the building up of smaller forms, and the flow of creative energy surging through the Vulcan’s forge of the artist’s consciousness to take solid form on the surface of the canvas: here a majestic, imposing, vital structure representing the grandeur and force of nature, as well as of the artist himself. As Michael Greenwood contends, ‘The work itself is a “living” organism, identified by its own internal logic, structure, substance and energy’ (66). It is perhaps significant, given the materiality of the mountain, that in the sixties Riopelle also turned to sculpture, to working with solid masses, ‘to discover or create forms,’ stating that: ‘my painting influences my sculpture and my sculpture influences my painting.’36 Unlike

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his statues, which stand in real space, Riopelle always constructs his paintings as ‘landscapes,’ albeit inner ones, as he notes in an interview from 1977: ‘l’organisation d’un tableau, c’est un paysage, mais un paysage mental’ (the organization of a painting is that of a landscape, but a mental landscape).37 Ultimately, of course, the principal space is that of the canvas itself, and the ultimate construction that of the artist, even more than of nature, as Riopelle reminds us by a stack of mosaic blocks to the right of the canvas and a hint of the same to the left, which bear no possible relation to nature other than to distinguish it from the work itself, marked by this stamp of the artist, so typical of his style as to replace the signature he refused to affix to later canvases, lest they impinge on the integrity of the image. Riopelle’s recreated mountain, by its very liberation from reality, from traditional forms and perspectives, stands for the artist’s freedom, much as the mountain did for Menaud. Rather than mumble the word ‘liberty’ or seek it in a distant mountain or an inner withdrawal, however, Riopelle creates liberty by interiorizing the mountain, by transforming it, reconstructing it on canvas: in short, he liberates the mountain, his art form, and himself by the artist’s action in ‘an intensive affirmation of reality’ (Pocock, 113). A further pairing of painting and text will provide yet another perspective on Riopelle’s La montagne, in relation to Gabrielle Roy’s novel, La montagne secrète, the subject of the next chapter. Before turning there, however, let’s return once more to the question of identity. In an impassioned article on art and identity in Quebec in 1976, in the wake of the Quiet Revolution, Fernande Saint-Martin, director of the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal from 1972–7, acknowledges the role of Borduas and his group in building the foundation for a ‘nouvelle âme québécoise’ (20; new Quebecois soul), while regretting that the present state of the arts hinders its definition: ‘Comment dans ce grand tournoiement, le Québec retrouvera-t-il le sens de son identité?’ (27; In this great swirl, how will Quebec determine the sense of its own identity?) Louise Vigneault pursues an answer to this very question in her penetrating study of the automatist group, Identité et modernité dans l’art au Québec, in which she discusses Borduas and Riopelle in detail, noting that both artists further national identity by reactivating and renewing a colonial archetype – Borduas the martyred missionary (178), Riopelle the nomadic trapper (314–15) – each archetype reincarnated in the artist figure, as we shall also see in Roy’s La montagne secrète. More to the point here, Vigneault sees the evolving Quebec

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‘identity’ precisely as a matter of ‘modernity’ (174, 365), but what are the constituents of these two concepts? Certainly liberation is foremost, but also construction on behalf of the collectivity, both overtly key notions of the Quiet Revolution. Indeed, in an article published in 1969, Jean Sarrazin describes the then-present state of Quebec: ‘Ainsi, à vingt ans de distance, au cri libérateur de contestation globale de la société québécoise lancé par Borduas, répond aujourd’hui un mouvement positif, non plus de contestation permanente mais de construction permanente d’un art pensé et conçu spécialement dans ses rapports avec la société du Québec en évolution dynamique’ (275–6; Thus, at twenty years distance, to Borduas’s liberating call for a total contestation of Quebec society, there responds today a positive movement, not of permanent contestation but of permanent construction of an art considered and conceived specially in its relationship to a Quebec society in dynamic evolution). His words of collective construction are echoed by those of Gilles Marcotte, who links them to the very notion of ‘modernity’: ‘Qu’est-ce que la modernité, sinon la conscience du mouvement et celle que, sous les apparences se cache une réalité qui est toujours à découvrir … que tout est à faire, tout à dire, tout à inventer … la fondation d’une parole qui prenne en charge les besoins et les désirs de la collectivité.’ (12; What is modernity if not the consciousness of movement … that, beyond appearances lies a reality ready to be discovered … that everything can be done, stated, invented ... the foundation of a message that takes account of the needs and desires of the collectivity.) In fact, each of the works in this chapter involves a path from selfdiscovery to self-construction via self-representation on behalf of the individual and the community.38 Moreover, the very fact that each work has exacted several different, sometimes contradictory, readings suggests the notions of openness and plurality that will come to characterize the concept of identity for future generations, along with the persistent notion of contradiction. In essence, for identitary progress to occur, contradiction must be understood and embraced,39 not as the exclusionary terms of a static antithesis but as the dynamic components of a dialectical process, whereby a transcendent third term defines a new dimension of culture, creating a new synthetic space as in Baudelaire’s celebrated forest, ‘vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté’ (vast like night and daylight) or a broader place as with Markham’s wider circle that takes in the heretic whose smaller circle would shut out others.40

Chapter Eight

From Solitude to Solidarity: La montagne secrète

One major consequence of the innovations staged by Borduas and Riopelle (chapter seven) is, according to Louise Vigneault, the promotion of the artist figure to the position of torchbearer in the quest for identity, displacing the coureur de bois and the voyageur (Identité, 178, 314–5). Certainly, two major novels published at some interval bear out this contention: Gabrielle Roy’s La montagne secrète (1961) and Anne Hébert’s Le premier jardin (1988). Roy’s novel, La montagne secrète, is both dedicated to and based on the life of her friend, the painter René Richard, who later did an illustrated edition of the novel (1975). The third-person narrator recounts the voyages of a painter called simply Pierre – whose last name is not revealed until the final pages, thereby reinforcing the overarching questions of identity and universality. The painter, whose perspective the narrator usually espouses, has for some time been bent on discovering the ‘secret’ of nature, art, others, and the self: ‘Il y avait déjà dix ans qu’il était en route pour chercher ce que le monde voulait de lui – ou lui du monde.’ (18; Already he had spent ten years on this road, seeking what the world would have of him – or he of the world [12].)1 As Pierre wrestles with his identity and vocation, the reader quickly perceives that he represents not only Gabrielle Roy herself, but also every artist, every man.2 The painter’s quest takes him to three distant places, each serving as setting for one of the novel’s three parts: the Northwest Territories (chapters 1–4); the Ungava region in northern Quebec (chapters 10–16); and finally France (chapters 17–26). The location of the first two parts in the ‘far north’ marks the culmination of a long-standing fascination with the pays d’en haut that is a permanent part of the FrenchCanadian psyche, as reflected in its art and ultimately, according to Jack

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Warwick, embodied in the artist-figure: ‘there was little before La montagne secrète to show that the voyageur type in literature was on his way to becoming an artist. On the other hand, there was everything to show that this was his destiny’ (The Long Journey, 99).3 Moreover, in addition to this geographical/psychological gravitation towards the north, there is in this novel, as André Brochu notes, ‘un déplacement continu vers l’Est, qu’on peut interpréter comme la transposition spatiale de cette quête de la lumière qui sous-tend l’activité du peintre’ (La Montagne, 539; a continual displacement towards the East, which can be interpreted as the spatial transposition of this quest for light that underlies the painter’s actions). In short, along with its political and social context, La montagne secrète is informed by literary history, art history, and mythology, the very constitutive elements of this study. Part One: Solitude Descriptive passages in La montagne secrète have the added dimension of being perceived through the trained eye of Pierre, which lends the novel a highly visual or ‘spectacular’ quality,4 as in this description of a solitary quaking aspen, which inaugurates the second chapter: Pierre s’approcha de la berge, planta sa pagaie debout dans l’eau peu profonde, près du bord, pour examiner à loisir, en détaillant sa forme, le frêle peuplier-tremble. Très penché au-dessus de l’eau, l’arbre avait l’air de considérer comment pour lui tout allait bientôt finir. Pierre prit dans sa poche un bout de crayon, un morceau de papier. Les feuilles de l’arbre tremblaient. Il s’en échappait un faible son pareil à une voix de tendresse. Pierre écouta un long moment. Il eût aimé à travers son dessin faire entendre aussi quelque chose de cette voix. Mais quelle était donc sa tâche qui se faisait plus exigeante, plus audacieuse, à mesure que lui-même progressait? De cette manière, comment atteindre son but? Ah, mais n’importe! Peut-être ne s’agissait-il dans le fond que de rendre cet arbre distinct de tous les autres, de le révéler. Il commença son croquis en traits extraordinairement rapides, scrutant malgré lui son propre mobile. Qu’est-ce en somme qui l’intéressait? Le côté solitaire, abandonné de la création? [20; Pierre drew close to the bank, planting his paddle upright in the shallow water near shore so that he might examine the tiny aspen at leisure, remarking its every detail. As it leaned out low over the water, the little tree gave you the impression of deeply pondering its own forthcoming demise. Pierre plucked from his pocket a bit of pencil and a scrap of paper.

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The leaves of the tree were fluttering. Their gentle murmur gave voice to a song of tenderness. Pierre listened for a while. He would have loved to let some portion of that voice be heard through the lines of his drawing. But what indeed was his purpose, ever more insistently exacting, more daring, the farther he himself moved onward? Oh, well! No matter! Perhaps there was nothing more involved than the job of making this individual tree distinct from all other trees, to be the author of its revelation. He began his sketch with lines extraordinarily quick and nervous, despite himself probing the motive cause of what he was doing. What, more than all else, held his interest captive? The solitary, lonely, abandoned side of things? (14)]

In her description, Roy attempts to depict Pierre’s quest to learn about himself, nature, and art by intertwining his questions with his perceptions of the tree and his concomitant efforts to capture it on paper. The life lesson learned here through confrontation with the lone aspen is the overriding one of the first part of the novel: solitude (‘le côté solitaire, abandonné de la création’). Since, at this point, Pierre’s artistic medium is drawing, Roy again limits herself to suggestions of form and avoids any mention of colour. One might also say that her use of free indirect discourse in short elliptical phrases (‘Ah, mais n’importe!’) imitates the drawing style (‘en traits extraordinairement rapides’) she attributes to Pierre,5 based no doubt on her perception of René Richard’s own manner. Among the twenty-six lithographs in the portfolio for the illustrated edition of La montagne secrète, divided among landscapes, portraits, and animal studies, Richard includes this landscape, entitled Homme adossé à un arbre (figure 8.1).6 Here, as in Roy’s description, the solitude and fragility of the tree are matched by those of the man leaning on it, and are accentuated by the empty space surrounding the conjoined figures in the foreground, which seem at some remove from the equally isolated trees in the background. The sparse drawing style further emphasizes the barrenness of the setting and sets the stage for a primitive encounter of man and nature.7 The entire first part of Roy’s novel is, like the quaking aspen scene, based on a series of similarly constructed episodes, anchored by a landscape description in which the perception of a natural phenomenon (usually accompanied by a cultural artefact) causes Pierre to learn something about life and concurrently something about art: if not answers then ongoing questions. In chapter four, for example, having joined his friend Steve for a winter of trapping, Pierre sees and paints their cabin, again with a sense of

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8.1 Richard, René. Homme adossé à un arbre, du livre d’artiste ‘La montagne secrète,’ 1975. Lithographie, 62 /170, 33,2 x 26,2 cm. Musée national des beauxarts du Québec, 1977.42.01. Photo: Pierre-Luc Dufour. © Fondation René Richard / Man Leaning Back against a Tree, from the Artist Book ‘La montagne secrète,’ 1975. Lithograph, 62 / 170, 33.2 x 26.2 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1977.42.01. Photo: Pierre-Luc Dufour. © Fondation René Richard.

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solitude: ‘Or, quelque part dans ce haut territoire, une forêt … Quelque part dans cette forêt de misère une cabane. Jamais encore n’a dessiné rien de si seul Pierre.’ (33; And here, somewhere in these northerly lands, a forest … Somewhere within this forest of misery a cabin. Never yet had Pierre recorded on paper anything so lonely [29].) Roy captures the impact of the cabin’s isolation on Pierre by the inverted structure of the final sentence, placing the adjective ‘seul,’ which modifies the subject of the drawing, before the noun designating Pierre, where, in fact, it qualifies and thus defines both the cabin and the artist. Indeed, it is from his drawings of the cabin that Pierre learns a similar lesson, one that responds to an earlier question of why the drawing of the tree is more powerful than the tree itself – because art can modify nature to accentuate a particular effect: ‘Il y a lieu quelquefois de forcer un peu le trait, de souligner. Que les choses se mettent à en dire un peu plus dans l’image que sur nature.’ (37; It was necessary occasionally to overemphasize the stroke a trifle, to underline. That things should have a little more to say in drawing than they do in nature [34].) Culture sometimes captures, and occasionally enhances, nature. After a winter of near total darkness and beset by scurvy, with the return of spring Pierre gets a strong sense of the warmth, animation, and persistence of life, which leads him to learn that art must be not just a matter of line and drawing, but also of light and colour: Il voyait dans l’étendue grise du ciel s’ouvrir comme un petit lac d’eau claire; des nuages roses en formaient les rivages. Il y avait dans cette eau du ciel une couleur à laquelle n’eût pu convenir aucun nom connu, quelque doux mélange de bleu et de vert déjà difficile à définir dans sa pensée. Avait-il donc jamais auparavant vu des couleurs? Leur enchantement éclatait dans sa tête, sans commander de formes, libres et pures, en elles-mêmes un chant de la création. [45–6; He beheld in the grey stretches of the sky an opening like some tiny lake of crystal water, its edges bordered by rosy clouds. There was, in this water of heavens, a colour to which might properly be ascribed no name known to man: some soft mingling of blue and green hard enough to define even in thought. Was it possible that he had never before seen colours? Their enchantment exploded in his mind, without reference to shape – free and pure, in themselves a song of creation. (43)]

The effect of pure colours, freed from the objects to which they normally adhere, is captured by Roy’s figurative language, which expresses

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colour in the nominal form (‘de bleu et de vert’), while mixing states of matter (‘cette eau du ciel’) and forms of art (‘un chant’). It is at this point that Pierre longs for the coloured pencils of his youth; his friend Steve, undertaking a hazardous trip in search of vitamin C for scurvy, finds a package of pencils, and with them Pierre rejuvenates his drawing (51).8 In the three final chapters of part one, the most dominant and revealing aspect of the landscape for Pierre is water, in whose movement he senses a freedom that produces a feeling of joy (53). This perception about life in turn leads him to a discovery about art: that movement and complexity call for oil painting – ‘ces somptueuses couleurs, cette matière ambiguë appelaient l’huile’ (57; such sumptuous colours, such ambiguous material, fairly cried out for oils [56]) – a medium that proves far more difficult than pencils and crayons (60). At the same time he also comes to realize that to grow means to discover, and for that he must remain alone and thus leave behind his good friend, Steve. As he sets off towards ‘un immense et solitaire région’ (63; a vast and lonely expanse [64]), he narrowly avoids a fatal canoe accident, during which he loses his paints by grasping onto, significantly, the branch of an isolated tree: Du canot emballé il s’élança, sauta en l’air, saisit la branche retombante. Il y resta suspendu, vit son canot courir, se fracasser contre les écueils. Déchiré également, le coffret à peintures laissa échapper son contenu. Alors, cette rivière étrange, se couvrant de taches de couleurs, offrit le plus étrange spectacle. Jaillies en tous les sens, les toiles aux couleurs fraîches bondissaient, viraient, se dissociaient, puis de nouveau venaient se juxtaposer comme pour composer à la surface de l’eau une suite d’images brisées, sans lien ni signification, quoique belles d’un éclat extraordinaire. Ce ne fut plus que des carmins, des verts acides, des jaunes ensoleillés qui tournoyaient … Cependant, la petite pochade dernière venue semblait vouloir retourner à Pierre. Des courants adverses se la jetèrent de l’un à l’autre. Avec sa surface peinte offerte au ciel, elle tourna dans les parages, un moment en vint presque à se réfugier dans les eaux plus tranquilles, sur le bord. Pierre se penchait, allait tenter de la rattraper … alors elle glissa vivement, fut à son tour happée par les remous. Elle s’engouffra dans l’entonnoir profond de la rivière. [65–6; He hurled himself up into the air out of the runaway canoe and grasped the trailing branch. There he hung, swaying, saw his canoe race on and shatter against the reefs. Also torn apart, the painting box disgorged its contents. Then this strange river, covering itself with spots of colour, offered the strangest of sights. Scattered

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in every direction, his sketches with their fresh colours hurtled over each other, twirled, moved apart, then drew together as though to fashion on the surface of the water a series of broken images, without relation or meaning, though of amazingly brilliant loveliness. All one saw was carmine, acid greens, sunny yellows, spinning about … Meanwhile the last born of the little sketches seemed to want to return to Pierre. Eddies jostled it back and forth. With its painted surface facing the sky it circled around a narrow area, for a moment almost found refuge in the calmer water along the bank. Pierre reached out, was about to recover it … and then it slid quickly, was in its turn snatched by the whirlpools, and sucked into the river’s mighty funnel. (67)]

This kaleidoscopic scene, a virtuoso piece for Roy, has, like the paints permeating the water, several layers of meaning: While the movement of the rapids and the elusive pochade (colour sketch) remind us of the artist’s always precarious struggle to capture nature, the loss of paints and destruction of the canoe recall the power of nature over art, culture, even life itself.9 On a more individual level, Pierre has discovered his vocation in art, but not yet his direction, as the eddying waters and confused colours suggest. At the same time, paradoxically, one might say that Gabrielle Roy, through her description of the swirling colours on the surface of the water, manages to prefigure Pierre’s later style and that of René Richard, whose fresh colours themselves vibrate and  resonate on the surface of the canvas, detaching themselves from objects and recombining in ways that can suggest pure painting or abstract art.10 Part Two: Encounters Part two begins with a global perspective spanning the thousands of miles that encompass the far northern region of Quebec called l’Ungava, an area so vast and desolate that it seems to exclude a human viewpoint: ‘À perte de vue, en été, le ciel regarde cette terre vide, et la terre vide regarde ce ciel si curieusement plein de clarté.’ (69; As far as can be seen, in summer, the sky looks over this empty land, which looks up at this sky so curiously full of light [my translation].)11 The scene then narrows from a moon’s-eye to a bird’s-eye perspective, as, from an elevated vantage point atop a ridge, through the eyes of the Eskimo Orok, we observe a lone white man paddling along a treacherous river. When the traveller stops to paint, Orok realizes it

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must be the renowned ‘Homme-au-crayon-magique’ (Man-of-theMagic-Pencil); the reader, whose sign-reading skills are enhanced by sharing the Amerindian’s perspective, has by now recognized Pierre, who reassumes the novel’s vantage point, bringing it back to earth.12 The painter still seeks, often misses, but occasionally finds, his place within the world through art: ‘lui-même avait été en ces jours exceptionnels où l’homme, qui se surpasse et se dépasse, se sent pourtant, ces jours-là seulement, lui-même’ (78; he himself had dwelt in those rare days when a man, while surpassing and outdoing his own nature, yet feels that only on such days is he really himself [79]). Identity (‘luimême avait été … lui-même’) is seen as a matter of encounter, the key term for the second part of the novel as Pierre encounters nature, art, himself, and others. The first encounter is with the secret mountain, whose sudden appearance at the end of chapter eleven is startling: ‘Pierre voyait grandir devant lui une tache lumineuse. Il fit quelques pas encore, tourna le flanc sombre du rocher. Devant lui se dressait une haute montagne isolée que le soleil rouge embrasait et faisait brûler comme un grand feu clair. Pierre, d’un coup d’épaule, se débarrassa du canot, se défit de son sac, se laissa lui-même tomber comme à genoux devant la montagne.’ (79; Pierre saw a luminous spot grow larger before his eyes. He took a few more steps, went around the shaded flank of the rocky promontory. Before him towered a high and solitary mountain that glowed in the red sunlight like a great pillar of fire. With a toss of his shoulder Pierre freed himself of the canoe, let his packsack slip from his shoulders, and himself slipped to his knees as though in reverence for the mountain [80–1].) The personal viewpoint (‘Pierre voyait’), the size (‘grandir’), the light (‘une tache lumineuse’), the isolation (‘isolée’), and the colour (‘rouge’) accentuated by a visual simile (‘comme un grand feu clair’) serve to set off this apparition, which Pierre further elevates by a gesture of worship (‘à genoux’).13 The mountain, both in nature and on canvas, dominates the second part of the novel, as in the lengthy description at the beginning of the following chapter: Elle était fière incomparablement, et incomparablement seule. Faite pour plaire à un œil d’artiste en ses plans, ses dimensions, ses couleurs. Et aussi choisit-elle pour se montrer l’heure la plus glorieuse. À sa base, nourrie par un sol meilleur à cause sans doute des alluvions et de l’eau toute proche, elle portait une ceinture de petits bouleaux fragiles, qui frémissaient

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en cette fin de jour dans un bruit de ruisseau – leurs feuilles rebroussées par le vent avaient du reste l’éclat furtif d’une eau qui court au soleil. Ensuite, jusqu’à mi-hauteur, elle apparaissaient fleurie de lichens flamboyants, comme si sa propre couleur, de roc fauve par endroits, ailleurs rouillé, ou encore d’un bleu de nuit étrange, n’eût pas suffi à éblouir. Puis, se dépouillant de toute végétation, elle montait, se resserrant en un pic géant de teinte plus sombre mais plus rare encore. Presque parmi les nuages, elle se terminait en une pointe de neige et de glace qui étincelait comme un joyau la couronnant, elle se mirait toute dans un petit lac à ses pieds, qui semblait l’aimer, sans fin la contempler, se tenant lui-même dans une parfaite immobilité d’eau turquoise, ourlée sur ses bords d’une épaisse mousse de caribou. Plus loin, dans une petite prairie, auprès de si puissante montagne, s’agitaient dans leur naïve beauté d’un jour des pavots de l’Arctique. [81–2; It was proud – incomparably proud – and incomparably alone. Fashioned to please the eye of an artist in its planes, its dimensions, its colours; and it had chosen, moreover, to reveal itself in its most glorious hour. Around its base, and presumably nourished by the better soil provided by its own erosion and the moisture from the nearby water, it bore a cincture of tiny fragile birch trees, which, at that day’s end, trembled with the murmuring sound of a quiet brook – and indeed their leaves, twisting in the wind, had the fugitive sheen of running water in the  sunlight. Beyond that, reaching halfway up its flanks, the mountain seemed aflower with flamboyant lichens, as though its own proper colours – here a tawny patch of rock, there a streak of rusty red, then again a strange mass of midnight blue – were not enough to bedazzle. Above this, free of all vegetation, it mounted sheer, gathering itself into a fine giant obelisk of a darker, yet even rarer, tint. Almost among the clouds, it ended in a pinnacle of snow and ice that sparkled like a jewel. From its base to this crowning diadem, it was reflected whole in a lake at its feet, which, in the perfect stillness of its turquoise waters, hemmed along its edges with caribou moss, seemed rapt in eternal contemplation and love of that which it mirrored. And farther afield, in a meadow small compared to so powerful a mountain, there trembled, in their simple beauty of a single day, a mass of Iceland poppies. (82–3)]

The painter’s (and thus painterly) perception sets the visual parameters (‘en ses plans, ses dimensions, ses couleurs’) for Roy’s majestic description, organized around its systematic notation of planes (the water near, the mountain in the middle, the prairie in the distance), dimensions (from its extensive base up to its gigantic peak crowned by snow), and

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colours (its natural rocky hue transformed by the tints of flame, rust, and deep blue). Roy also bestows a human quality on the scene through her sustained use of personification for both the mountain (‘Elle était fière,’ ‘choisit-elle’) and the lake (‘qui semblait l’aimer, sans fin la contempler’).14 At the same time, the size of the mountain and the scope of the scene require the viewer’s eye movement, signalled by temporal adverbs positioned prominently at the beginning of successive sentences (‘Ensuite,’ ‘Puis’) and accompanied by active verbs attributed to the mountain itself (‘se montrer,’ ‘elle montait,’ ‘se terminait,’ ‘se mirait’). Roy’s use of personification accentuates Pierre’s discovery about the meaning of the mountain for him: indeed, each is seen a component of the other’s identity, which Roy underscores through the use of direct discourse, even for the mountain, which seems to speak to Pierre: ‘personne ne m’ayant vue jusqu’ici, est-ce que j’existais vraiment? Tant que l’on n’a pas été contenu en un regard, a-t-on la vie? A-t-on la vie si personne encore ne nous a aimés? (82; since until now no man has seen me, did I in truth exist? As long as you have not been held captive in another’s eyes, do you live? Are we alive if no one has ever loved us? [83]). In short, human perception and interest bestow existence, thus identity, on the objects they encounter and at the same time on their observer, as Pierre discovers: ‘Ainsi donc, se disait-il, ne nous trahissent pas nos grands rêves mystérieux d’amour et de beauté. Ce n’est pas pour se jouer de nous qu’ils nous appellent de si loin et conservent sur nos âmes leur emprise infinie.’ (82; And so, he said to himself, our great mysterious dreams of beauty and love do not play us false. It is not to mock us that they summon us from so far away and hold fast our souls in their relentless grasp [83].) Pierre understands that this particular mountain concretizes his ideal (‘rêves’), which leads towards his essential self (‘âme’), that he is unified with it (‘amour’), and that each is a necessary player in the other’s identity, without (yet) understanding why. The implications for the writer/reader and painter/viewer relationships are inescapable and to be explored throughout the rest of the novel. Whereas the movement and thus totality through progressive construction characterizing Roy’s description of the mountain fall naturally into the realm of prose, a chronological medium, they seemingly lie beyond the limits of painting, an ostensibly static medium, as Pierre reluctantly comes to acknowledge: Il se vit de nouveau contraint par l’imposante architecture à n’en choisir qu’une partie à la fois. Il fallait se limiter à l’une des facettes du joyau, en

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prendre, en laisser, fractionner la superbe montagne. Ce lui était douloureux. Qui n’a rêvé, en un seul tableau, en un seul livre, de mettre enfin tout l’objet, tout le sujet; tout de soi; toute son expérience, tout son amour, et combler ainsi l’espérance infinie, l’infinie attente des hommes! [83; Once again he found himself forced by the imposing architecture to select from it only a single portion at a time. He had to limit himself to one facet of the jewel, take this, leave that, parcel out this superb structure. It saddened him. Who has not dreamed, on a single canvas, within a single book, to include once for all the whole object, the whole subject; one’s all, all one’s experience, all one’s love, and thus fulfill the infinite hope, the infinite expectation of men! (85)]

One senses in this passage Pierre’s frustration (‘douleureux’), which stems from the conflict between his dream of totality (‘tout’) and his recognition of the limits (‘contraint’) of his medium, which cause him to break up his vision of the mountain into fragments (‘fractionner la superbe montagne’). The conjoining of painting (‘tableau’) and text (‘livre’) illustrate to what degree La montagne secrète is about writing as much as painting, and thus to what extent the novel is metacritical and autobiographical, as Roy readily confirmed in a statement that unites her with Pierre, while linking writing (‘book’) to painting (‘picture’): ‘I think a writer dreams, as Pierre of The Hidden Mountain hoped, of putting all the subjects, briefly, in one undertaking. Of course he never arrives there, and that is why there are always writers and always artists … Fundamentally what we hope is to get it all down in one book, or in one picture, or in one song, but of course always something is left out. That’s why we start again’ (in Cameron, 144). A similar contrast between fragment and totality can be found by comparing Richard’s drawings of La montagne secrète15 – which focus, like Pierre’s sketches, on one facet of the mountain, rendered by Richard’s twisted, turning strokes, lending the drawings the same sense of torment experienced by Pierre – to Richard’s oil painting, La montagne secrète, presumably from 1975, the year of the illustrated edition, but whose style could easily make it as early as the 1960s, which has a far different feeling, going well beyond the mere choice of medium (plate 11). Here the breadth of the composition, capturing the entire mountainside, set off by the forest in the foreground, lends the painting a scope rivalling that of Roy’s description and Pierre’s dreams. The bright colours, especially the warm set of golds against the gamut of greens, the rich texture imparted by the heavy impasto, the freedom of

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the broad brushwork, and the upward movement of the mountain matched by that of the trees in the foreground create a sense of harmony that implies a union of nature and observer through the medium of art. The assessment of Richard’s art by his friend Dr Urgel Pelletier seems particularly apt for this monumental painting: ‘Ce qui caractérise d’ailleurs ce peintre c’est qu’il a su, par la fraîcheur et la richesse de son coloris, par l’assurance et la force de son coup de pinceau, traduire le décor naturel de notre pays en lui conservant tout son pittoresque et sa beauté grandiose.’ (150; What characterizes this painter incidentally is that, by the freshness and richness of his colours, by the assurance and power of his brushwork, he knew how to translate the natural landscape of our country while preserving its scenic beauty and grandeur.)16 This first encounter with the mountain in part two follows the pattern established in part one, in which an aspect of nature leads to discoveries, first about the self, then about art. Further episodes involve the same three components – nature, self, art – but sequenced differently and often triggered by encounters with other human beings. While Pierre is painting, for example, Orok comes to join him and shares his food, just as Pierre shares his paints and knowledge with the Eskimo. As much as Pierre enjoys the company, he is anxious for the solitude that will favour painting and is not sorry to see Orok leave so that he can explore further directions in his work, such as a resolution to the problem of fragmentation inherent in painting: ‘Il sut comment faire: non pas un seul grand tableau ainsi que son ambition trop avide l’avait d’abord voulu, mais une série de petits tableaux, chacun envisageant un biais particulier, arrachant à la montagne un peu de sa réalité; et cela, réuni, ce serait la Resplendissante.’ (87–8; He suddenly realized how he should proceed. He must not attempt a single, large painting, as his too eager ambition had at first proposed, but rather a series of small pictures, each concerned with one special angle, tearing from the mountain a portion of its reality. And these, taken all together, would be the Resplendent One [89].) The mountain will acquire its full meaning not at once, but over time, through a series of conjoined images that together constitute its essence, much like Monet’s haystacks or Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire or, as Pierre will later discover, much like the self, and as the reader will come to realize, much like the novel itself. As Pierre works on the series, he begins to find some satisfaction, but he learns paradoxically that while solitude is necessary for discovery, others are necessary to validate not only his work but also his humanity through a type of union (‘entente’) effected by art (91–2). Painting, for

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Pierre, is a matter of freedom (90), and much like Le Lucon near the end of Menaud, he sees that personal freedom as linked to his humanness: ‘Mais, lorsque lui-même se libérait, pensait Pierre, est-ce que du même coup il ne libérait pas aussi d’autres hommes, leur pensée enchaînée, leur esprit souffrant?’ (90; But, thought Pierre, whenever he himself set himself free, did he not, by that very fact, also set other men free, set free their imprisoned thought, their suffering spirit? [92]) It is, no doubt, this movement from self to other, from solitude to solidarity, that explains the evolution of his epithet for the mountain from ‘La Solitaire’ to ‘La Resplendissante,’ a term suggesting rays reaching out towards others. This encounter with himself and between himself and humanity pushes Pierre to work even harder to wrest the secrets from nature, but he neglects to heed the warning signs of impending change of seasons and finds himself trapped by winter, with little food to sustain him. It is at this point that he has another encounter, with nature, in the form of a wild animal: ‘Il leva les yeux, il aperçut dans le fond de la petite vallée, arrêté là comme pour réfléchir lui aussi, un caribou aux énormes bois, tel un arbre sur sa tête.’ (92; He raised his eyes and saw at the end of the tiny valley, standing stock-still as though itself reviewing its own situation, a caribou with antlers towering like a tree upon its head [94].) The aging caribou not only reflects Pierre (‘lui aussi’), but also recalls the tree (‘tel un arbre’) that had prompted his first discovery of solitude. Both together represent nature and ultimately Pierre’s natural self.17 Desperate for food, he wounds the animal, then follows the tracks of its blood through a labyrinth of rocks well into the night, until he fells it with a hatchet, then weeps over the unbearable harshness and suffering of life (96). Upon returning to his camp, he finds it has been raided by a foraging bear that has destroyed not only his provisions and possessions but also his studies of the mountain, which then seems to reproach him for his failures. Discouraged to the point of contemplating suicide, but sustained by the thought of the mountain to be rescued by his art in the future, Pierre makes his way towards Orok’s faraway village, which he somehow manages to reach. Recuperating, he is compared again to both tree and animal, ‘décharné comme les bois d’un caribou’ (100; emaciated as a caribou’s tree-like antlers [my translation]), and, reflecting on the lessons nature has taught him, his subsequent art reveals ‘la souffrance de vivre’ (101; life’s suffering [105]). At this point Pierre has yet another important encounter, with an old Breton missionary, Père Bonniec, whose perspective dominates the final chapter of the novel’s second

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part. Bonniec is especially moved by the one study of the mountain that Pierre had managed to save, a work in striking greens and an intense luminosity (‘un lointain invisible, lumineux’ [104; a distance invisible, luminous]) that suggests spirituality, a perception whose formulation and inclusion in the novel adds a further dimension to our own understanding of Pierre’s and Richard’s painting as well as of Roy’s writing. Bonniec, who knows a lot about life and art, muses at length on the nature of art: ‘Créer, se dit-il, comme s’il ne le découvrait qu’à l’instant, n’est-ce pas de toute son âme protester? À moins … à moins, ajouta-t-il songeur, que ce ne soit une secrète collaboration.’ (103; ‘To create,’ he muttered to himself, as though he had only just discovered it, ‘is this not to protest with all one’s soul … unless,’ he added, deep in thought, ‘it be indeed a secret collaboration’ [108].) But to whom, against what, on behalf of what is the protestation? What kind of collaboration does Bonniec have in mind, and with whom? The reader, like Pierre, is left to wrestle with such questions as part two comes to a close and Pierre leaves for an exhibition in Montreal arranged by Bonniec. Throughout the second part of the novel Pierre has had a series of encounters and made several discoveries – about nature, about art, about himself, and about others – he has a strong intuition of their importance, but not (yet) an understanding of their meaning, which he continues to pursue in part three. Part Three: Solidarity After probing nature for the secrets of self and art in parts one and two, in part three Pierre probes art for the secrets of nature and self – ‘Comme naguère par des montagnes et des fleuves, aujourd’hui, par des noms: Titien, le Greco, Renoir, Gauguin, il se sentait appelé’ (114; As earlier he had been summoned by the mountains and the rivers, now it was by names – Titian, El Greco, Renoir, Gauguin – he felt called [120]). He thus begins to approach the twin questions of his quest – what the world would have of him, and he of the world – through the intermediary of art. In the wake of what turns out to be a successful exhibition in Montreal, Pierre is awarded a government grant to study in France, where, exposed to great works, he increases his reflections on art, several of which are included here, not only for the insights they shed on Pierre, but especially on Roy and Richard, seen as one by François Ricard, Roy’s premier biographer (‘Une rencontre,’ 6).

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In pondering the relationship between art and self-discovery suggested by Bonniec – ‘Nous connaîtrions-nous seulement un peu nousmêmes, sans les arts?’ (114; Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts? [120]) – Pierre discovers a bond between himself and other artists, notably Shakespeare. From this personal connection, he then sees a link to humanity – ‘l’art … était vaste, embrassait l’homme tout entier’ (116; The world of art … was vast, it encompassed almost the whole of man [122]) – which helps him to understand Bonniec’s earlier definition of art as collaboration and protestation: ‘L’artiste est protestataire; et d’abord contre le sort humain qui est de finir.’ (117; The artist is a protester; and first of all against the fate of all mankind, which is, that it must come to an end [124].) An increasing sense of the profound nature of art is reinforced by Pierre’s repeated discussions with his newfound friend and fellow painter, Stanislas Lanski, and the master painter, Augustin Meyrand, who, fascinated with the authenticity, originality, and vividness of Pierre’s sketches, accepts the Canadian in his studio despite his previous lack of professional training. Despite the stimulation of Paris, Pierre begins to languish and feels the constant (re)call of the wilderness: ‘Les animaux, mais aussi les arbres le hantaient. Souvent, depuis qu’il était à Paris, il se souvenait du tremble-peuplier qu’il avait vu seul, au bord de l’eau ... Le chant si lointain de son feuillage revenait en son souvenir. Il s’identifiait presque à cet arbre.’ (143; Animals haunted him, but so likewise did trees. Often since he came to Paris, he remembered the little aspen he had seen, standing alone, at the edge of the water … The plaint, so far away, of its foliage returned to his memory. He almost identified himself with this tree [152].) More than just a memory of nature, the image of the tree is a mirror of the self, which calls up, through identification (‘il s’identifiait’), the question of identity. The configuration of the vision, a single tree set against the vast surrounding forest, offers a possible interpretation of Pierre’s art and Quebec landscape painting in general, the individual identity set against nature, from which it is inseparable. This human meaning of the tree is also evident in Richard’s Homme adossé à un arbre (figure 8.1), in which the man and the tree are seen as one, and in Roy’s repeated comparisons of Pierre to a tree – such as ‘Lui, tel un arbre malmené par le vent, se tenait penché, tel un arbre qui s’écoute lui-même chanter’ (116; Like a tree buffeted by the wind, he held himself stooping forward, like a tree listening to itself sing [123]) – which suggest not only his roots, ‘l’arbre de ses racines lointaines’ (145; the tree, from its

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distant roots [154]), but the very essence of his primitive self, ‘l’élan primitif de son âme’ (123; a primitive surge of the soul [131]).18 In a sense this metaphorical thread stitches together the initial scene of the solitary tree with this later one, both based on the juxtaposition of place and space, culture and nature; thus interwoven, these thematic strands constitute the very fabric of the novel and, perhaps, along with ‘pure laine,’ that of the French-Canadian identity. Sensing Pierre’s fundamental incompatibility with the city and attachment to nature, Meyrand sends him away from Paris and into the countryside, where Pierre finds himself again free and at one with the world. His reflections on the power of art to resurrect places, such as Cézanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire (148), lead Pierre to reflect on his own secret mountain, and to his question of whether he has immortalized his own sacred place, he regrettably must respond in the negative. Determined to continue the struggle, Pierre returns to Paris, where he declines the opportunity to move into a vast, well-lit studio because it simply doesn’t fit his previous manner of painting and existing: ‘Il s’était fait à cette loi du Nord: l’immensité au-dehors, au-dedans l’exiguïté.’ (150; He had shaped himself to this law of the North: vast space outdoors; indoors kept small [161].) This ‘law,’ based on the juxtaposition of a small, enclosed cultural place set against the vast space of nature, governs not only Pierre’s painting but also serves as a key to Roy’s fundamental conception of space – ‘Le drame essentiel en moi se trouve, je pense, dans un tiraillement entre le chez soi et l’infini.’ (The essential drama inside me involves, I think, a tug-of-war between the home and the infinite.)19 If this ‘drama’ takes centre stage in Quebec art, it is, no doubt, as Jack Warwick concludes, because it is central to the national mentality: ‘That is the elementary appeal of the Canadian forest which has not changed, because the modern man setting out into it is still taking with him the same unsatisfied desire to balance order and freedom, and the same yearning to confront and interrogate something more absolute than the fragile realities of his real habitat’ (The Long Journey, 100). The specification of this law as a ‘loi du Nord’ seems to suggest that it is a matter of national identity, as Warwick contends (97), yet the empathy and fascination of the Frenchmen Augustin Meyrand and Stanislas Lanski, the latter of Polish extraction, and the earlier bond that Pierre feels with Shakespeare, as well as the international array of painters whose work attracts him, seem to strike a universal chord that resonates deeply in all humanity.20

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It is in Paris where, paradoxically, Pierre rediscovers his primitive self, along with the call of the wilderness: ‘Au bonheur étrange qui saisit son cœur, il comprit combien il s’était ennuyé du vent du Nord, des poudreries, des tourments de la tempête et de la nature.’ (152; By the strange happiness that took hold of his heart, he understood how much he had missed the wind of the North, the blowing snow, the tempestuousness of the storm and of nature [163].) If such discoveries about nature occur in the bastion of culture, it is because Pierre realizes that the secrets of both primitive self and wilderness lie not without but within, accessible through memory.21 In one of the most memorable and moving passages in all of FrenchCanadian literature, Pierre finally achieves the ultimate encounter – with himself: Ce qu’il peignit avec un tel acharnement à cette époque, c’était la partie éloignée, naïve et jeune de sa vie. Elle lui revenait, lui était entière restituée. Ou plutôt il avait l’impression de se rencontrer lui-même, tel qu’il avait été, voyageant avec confiance vers l’avenir. Descendant vers le passé, il se croisait allant de l’avant. Et les deux hommes un instant semblaient s’arrêter au bord d’une rivière pour se consulter, échanger des nouvelles ... Et alors Pierre eut l’ambition de résumer tout ce qui était de sa vie. Ne serait-ce pas là l’avantage de l’âge? Pressé, bousculé par le temps, parvenir à tout dire en quelques mots? Un dernier mot définitif, un tableau final: ce rêve le tenait. [154; What he was painting with such haste during those wearying days was the remote, artless, youthful portion of his life. It would come back to him, reconstituted in every detail. Or rather he had the impression of encountering his own self, as he had once been, journeying confidently toward the future. Plunging into the past, he crossed paths with himself headed forward. And it would seem to him that the two men stopped for an instant along the shore of some river to consult with each other and exchange news ... And that was when Pierre first had the ambition to recapitulate the whole story of his life. Was not this precisely the advantage of age? Pushed on, jostled by time, to succeed in saying everything in a few words? A last definitive word, a final picture: this dream enthralled him. (165)]

Pierre’s recuperation in its totality of time lost (‘la partie éloignée de sa vie ... entière restituée’) recalls Proust’s ‘madeleine’ episode, where all of Combray emerges from a cup of tea. Here, however, it is the paintings of past scenes that resurrect the image of the artist’s past self, who ascends

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towards consciousness to encounter his present counterpart, who in turn descends to meet his earlier incarnation, emerging from the arcane realms of the past. Unified as they are by the joint singular pronoun ‘se,’ these two selves restore the artist’s identity, which, like the series of paintings of the secret mountain, is a composite of the many components that constitute it. Identity is neither a single image, nor a set of identical ones, but a series of similar, identifiable ones that together form the self. That identity thus recuperated then gives Pierre the impetus to capture it on canvas, in a final painting (‘tableau final’), a definitive word (‘dernier mot définitif’), the equation of visual and verbal expression again confirming the extent to which Roy depicts the struggle not only of the painter but that of every artist, including, especially, herself. Not surprisingly Pierre begins this artistic quest, described in the following paragraph, with a scene from the northern woods: Sous son pinceau surgirent les bois du Nord; les arbres en étaient minces à se rompre; il les amincit encore; ce ne furent plus que des fils, allant se perdre à l’infini, rien que des fils, comment pouvaient-ils tenir debout? À la nudité de cette forêt il opposait souvent un petit campement humain. La tente basse était fixée à de courts piquets enfoncés dans le sol; à une vibration de l’air on devinait un feu par terre dont la flamme et la chaleur équivalaient ici à un cierge allumé; pourtant ce déroulement si léger de l’air montant du feu invisible avait une grâce incomparable. Aux arbres ténus restait parfois en quelque place abritée un grappe de feuilles d’automne; le regard se portait avec plaisir sur cette cascade de lumière; dans le vent âpre, le feuillage rouge avait comme un tournoiement vif, incessant. [154–5; Under his brushes the woods of the North surged into life; their trees were thin to the breaking point; he made them thinner yet; they became mere threads, repeating themselves until they were lost in infinity … no more than threads, how could they manage to stand upright? As a foil to the nakedness of the forest he often included a small human encampment. The low tent was fastened to short stakes driven into the soil; from a vibration in the air above it you could assume that there was a fire burning on the ground, of which the flame and the warmth were the equivalent of a candle lit before some shrine; still this slight disturbance of the air rising from the invisible fire had an incomparable grace. On the tenuous trees there remained, in some sheltered spot, an occasional bunch of autumn leaves; your eyes fell with pleasure upon this cascade of light; in the bitter wind the red foliage seemed to spin and gleam without ceasing. (165–6)]

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Pierre no longer hesitates to force a stroke (‘il les amincit encore’), to transform visual reality (‘ce ne furent plus que des fils’), in order to express an idea: the fragility of existence (‘comment pouvaient-ils tenir debout’). At the same time, the campfire emits a warmth that symbolizes the persistence of human culture through the metaphor of the lit candle (‘un cierge allumé’), achieving an effect of ‘grace’ in the two senses of the term, both applicable to art: beauty and spiritual ascendance.22 The camp tent, redundantly and thus pointedly modified by the adjective ‘humain,’ is set against the surrounding trees (‘À la nudité de cette forêt il opposait souvent un petit campement humain’), a juxtaposition of culture and nature that dominates Pierre’s landscapes. Moreover, as Pierre explains to Stanislas, the bunch of leaves has been borrowed from another context, the nearby Luxembourg Gardens, to effect a synthesis of near and far, present and past: ‘L’art se plaisait donc à ces rencontres imprévues d’objets naturellement si loin les uns des autres. Créer des liens était sa vie même.’ (155; Art, it would seem, took pleasure in these unforeseen encounters between objects naturally so remote from one another. Linking things together was of its very essence [166–7].) Again, the uniting power of art, here the link between France and Canada, seems to reinforce the notion of a universal, not just national, identity. In his portfolio for the illustrated version of La montagne secrète, René Richard includes many images of campsites: some in colour; some, like this one Le campement (figure 8.2), in black and white. This image, unlike any of the others, appears more than once: in fact, before each of the novel’s twenty-six chapters. It may be said, then, to represent Richard’s ‘composite’ view of the novel and to constitute the recurrent visual motif that holds the illustrated version together. In one sense the tent is a place, set against the vast space of the forest, a reminder of the presence and persistence of human activity and culture in the face of the forbidding wilderness. In another sense, however, the tent stems from nature, its crossed poles made of trees and resembling the trees in front of which they stand, themselves (as Roy’s text gives us to understand) symbols of human solitude and suffering. Ultimately, by superimposing the camp against the forest and surrounding both by empty space, Richard creates an image of harmony, which captures the reciprocal relationship between nature and man, the former giving man shelter and a sense of his primitive origins, man lending nature its identity, through perception, comprehension, and representation. This sense of the contradictory yet complementary tendencies that compose the

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8.2 Richard, René. Le campement, vers 1930. Encre sur papier brun, 21,2 x 21,5 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1977.43, don de l’artiste. Photo: Idra Labrie. © Fondation René Richard / The Campsite, circa 1930. Ink on brown paper, 21.2 x 21.5 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1977.43, gift of the artist. Photo: Idra Labrie. © Fondation René Richard.

French-Canadian identity (nature and civilization) came to Richard himself in the form of a revelation, which itself has a certain force of law: Alors je compris qu’il n’y avait rien à faire et que j’étais la proie de deux forces contradictoires qui me dominaient de façon intermittante et alternante. Je décidai donc de me laisser faire tant que je pouvais endurer cette

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tension. Je commençai aussi à comprendre que si la nature s’était enveloppée d’un tel charme, on le devait un peu à cette civilisation où j’avais rencontré des hommes qui m’avaient aidé à améliorer mon existence. Je compris aussi qu’une partie de moi-même ne pouvait vivre sans l’autre, son contraire. [128; Then I understood that nothing would change and that I was prey to two contradictory forces that dominated me intermittently and alternately. I thus decided to go along with it as long as I could endure this tension. I also began to understand that if nature was enveloped in such charm, it was partly due to this civilization where I had encountered men who had helped me better my existence. I further understood that one part of me could not live without the other, its opposite.]

In the penultimate chapter, Pierre himself senses he is nearing his elusive goal, which is to understand the place of beauty in human existence. In short, he realizes that beauty, attained through solitude, is ultimately a matter of solidarity with others,23 and Pierre now feels compelled to seek his universal identity, his profound link to humanity. To define the human condition, Pierre must now go beyond his personal memories and probe the very depths of his soul, which, as in the case of his earlier discoveries of the past, he must do through art. Like Rembrandt before him (120), Pierre now attempts in the final chapter to achieve self-understanding through a self-portrait, interpreted by his friend Stanislas: Stanislas voyait un visage bizarrement construit ... Sur le sommet de la tête se devinaient de curieuses protubérances, une suggestion de bois de cerf peut-être, que prolongeait comme un mouvement de feuillages ou d’ombres ... Qu’avait donc voulu suggérer Pierre? Quelle alliance étroite de l’âme avec les forces primitives? Ou la haute plainte d’une créature en qui se fût fondue l’angoisse de tuer et d’être tuée? Le portrait attirait comme vers une insolite région de la connaissance dont les arbres, avec leurs sombres entrelacements, donnaient quelque idée. Son attrait était dans cette sorte de fascination qu’il exerçait, au rebours de la clarté, vers les torturantes énigmes de l’être. [164–5; Stanislas saw an oddly fashioned countenance … On the top of the head there was a hint of curious protuberances, a suggestion of antlers, perhaps, given extension as though by a movement of foliage or shadows … What, then, had Pierre tried to suggest? What close alliance of the soul to all that is primitive? Or was this not the high-pitched lament in which are commingled the anguish of killing and of being killed? The portrait drew you as though into some unfrequented

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area of the consciousness, of which trees, with their intertwining shadowy traceries, might impart some idea. Its appeal lay in that kind of fascination with which it pointed – counter to all clarity – toward the harrowing enigmas of existence. (177–8)]

It is fitting that the portrait is seen by Pierre’s best friend since its message is one of solidarity in the face of suffering (‘alliance étroite’),24 a solidarity not only with the primitive forces of nature (‘forces primitives’), as seen in the protuberances emanating from Pierre’s head (‘une suggestion de bois de cerf’), but also with the viewer, who, through the portrait, accesses a barely intuited region of the soul: ‘une insolite région de la connaissance.’ Through his art, Pierre has moved from solitude to solidarity: he not only communicates for others within the painting but also with others through the painting.25 Although nearing death and bordering on despair (‘l’œuvre cent fois faite, jamais faite, encore le torturait’), this ‘homme arbre’ who has found his personal and human ‘roots’ can now be ‘identified’ as Pierre Cadorai by signing his works, however imperfect they remain, and assigning them for distribution to his closest friends (168).26 Having found himself and his humanness, Pierre has still not forged his ideal work; having understood and painted the human condition, he has still to find and realize the human potential, which comes to him in the final episode of the novel, a moment of artistic creation again worthy of Proust: Or, ce qui était au-delà du brouillard, il en avait le sentiment, était si bien ce qu’il cherchait, était si proche, qu’il commença à s’agiter parce qu’il ne l’apercevait pas encore. Puis il éprouva qu’il commençait à marcher sans effort de son grand pas rapide d’autrefois; il enjambait d’un seul bond de rudes obstacles; l’Ungava revenait vers lui. Ou lui, vers le grand désert en sa spendeur incroyable. Tout à coup le parcourut un frémissement si heureux qu’il se dressa dans l’attente de l’image qui forçait la brume, s’avançait vers lui telle une personne aimée. La montagne resplendissante lui réapparaissait. Sa montagne, en vérité. Repensée, refaite en dimensions, plans et volumes; à lui entièrement; sa création propre; un calcul, un poème de la pensée. Enfin il comprenait ce qu’entendait le maître quand il disait que n’est pas nécessairement œuvre d’art l’œuvre de Dieu. La montagne de son imagination n’avait presque plus rien de la montagne de l’Ungava. Ou, du moins, ce qu’il en avait pu prendre, il l’avait, à son propre feu intérieur, coulé, fondu, pour ensuite le mouler à son gré en une

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matière qui n’était désormais plus qu’humaine, infiniment poignante. [169–70; Now, what was behind the fog, he had the feeling, was so close that he began to be upset at not being able to make it out. He realized, too, that he was effortlessly striding back and forth, at the rapid pace of days gone by; at a single bound he would clear a lofty obstacle: Ungava was coming back to him. Or he was speeding toward the great desert in all its incredible splendour. Suddenly there passed over him so blissful a tremor of delight that he stood stock-still, awaiting the image that was breaking through the fog, gliding toward him like a loved one. The resplendent mountain was before him. But his mountain, in very truth. Freshly conceived, refashioned in its dimensions, in its facets and masses, wholly his, his own creation; a mathematics and a poem of the mind. At last he understood what the master had meant when he said that a work of God is not a work of art. The mountain of his imagination had almost nothing in common with the mountain in Ungava. Or at least what he had been able to capture of the latter he had, at his own inner fires, softened, melted, cleansed, to cast it anew, in his own fashion, making of it a new raw material, henceforth entirely human, infinitely poignant. (184–5)]

The creative moment is a privileged moment: that is, one of time recaptured. Not unlike his discovery of his past self, which, like the mountain here, moves towards him (‘l’Ungava revenait vers lui’) as he moves towards it (‘ou lui vers le grand désert’), Pierre’s experience is one of unqualified joy (‘un frémissement si heureux’). Whereas the mountain had eluded him in the outside world, he finds it within himself (‘son propre feu intérieur’). Having been haunted by memories of the past, he now turns memory itself into a primary creative tool; based on nature yet freed from its constraints, memory distils (‘coulé’), transforms (‘fondu’), moulds (‘mouler’), and humanizes (‘plus qu’humaine’). Again the adjective ‘humaine’ seems to place the matter of identity on a universal, not national, plane. Pierre’s image, like a mathematician’s intuition or a writer’s insight, has moved beyond nature towards the ideal (‘un calcul, un poème de la pensée’), which he can now transcribe on canvas: Pierre se mit à jeter hâtivement de légères petites touches de couleurs, autour desquelles devait s’harmoniser l’ensemble des plans et des jeux lumineux, complexe écheveau de coloris, d’ombre et de clarté; tout cela jailli pourtant en une seconde d’illumination. Il tremblait de crainte que lui soit ravi le moindre détail du songe passionnant. Il était injuste que l’homme, eût-il le temps de réfléchir, ne puisse matérialiser sa pensée dans

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le moment où il la tenait, complète, ramifiée – et cependant la tenait-il jamais, à l’intérieur de soi, cette autre vie de sa vie. [170–1; He began by hastily applying, at the centre, some light little splashes of mauve around which were to harmonize the general pattern of the planes and the playing luminosities, the complex skein of colours, the shadows and the light; all of this surging through him, moreover, in one brief second of illumination. He trembled lest there be wrested from him the tiniest detail of the enthralling dream. It was an injustice for man – had he had the time to reflect on it – that his thought cannot take flesh at the moment when he has it, so complete, so ramified; and yet, did he ever truly have it, in his own interior self, that other life of his life? (185–6)]

Here, unlike the earlier scene with the mountain before him, it is not the disparate traits of the mountain but the uniform ones of painting itself (‘de légères petites touches de couleur’) that dominate, harmonize (‘s’harmoniser’), and thus totalize the scene (‘complète, ramifiée’) in a way not possible through direct observation and transcription. In effect, he paints not the outside mountain, but its inner, other incarnation (‘à l’intérieur de soi, cette autre vie de sa vie’), characterized as a dream (‘songe passionnant’). René Richard, for whom also, as Hugues de Jouvancourt concludes, ‘l’œuvre est une totale construction de l’esprit, basée sur le souvenir’ (xv; the work is a total construction of the mind, based on memory), seeks a similar effect in a drawing, coloured in with felt-tip pens, not included in the dossier for the novel, but suggestively titled La montagne de mes rêves, circa 1975 (plate 12). The scope of the composition is even more vast than that of his other painting of the same period, La montagne secrète, yet he achieves a greater harmony through the unified strokes and colouration, which lend the drawing an unreal or ‘expressionist’ impact.27 Yet, to label his style ‘expressionist’ might itself be misleading, as Robert Bernier suggests in his eloquent appraisal of Richard’s manner, which serves as a fitting conclusion to our exploration of his work: ‘Sa démarche personnelle et solitaire n’a nul besoin de comparaison ou de justification. Elle est unique et ne s’insère dans la foulée ni de l’avant-garde ni d’une nostalgie romantique. René Richard développe son propre langage pictural, sa peinture s’affirme dans un esthétisme personnel ... les œuvres nous mettent en présence d’une vie entière, elles sont le témoignage d’un individu en osmose avec tout son environnement … Le paysage s’inscrit sur le support de larges coups que seule la passion peut induire.’ (Un siècle, 194–5; His personal, solitary approach has no need for

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comparison or justification. It is unique and doesn’t match the stride either of the avant-garde or of romantic nostalgia. René Richard develops his own pictorial language; his painting asserts itself in a personal aesthetic ... the works put us in the presence of an entire life, they testify to an individual in osmosis with his whole environment … The landscape is inscribed on the canvas in broad strokes that passion alone can induce.) Extending his hand towards his near perfect painting, Pierre is struck down by another heart attack and falls before his work. As the mountain fades, the narrator asks, on behalf of all artists: ‘Qui, dans les brumes, la retrouvera!’ (171; Who, in the mists, would ever find it again! [186]) Yet the exclamation point rather than a question mark seems to suggest a call to action to both writer and reader. Roy ends on the ambivalent note of the simultaneous power yet fragility not only of the creative act, but also of human existence.28 Through the intermediary of art, the individual discovers the identity of nature, the self, and others, as well as their common condition of suffering and solitude; and yet through the magic of art, the painter, writer, or reader surpasses these limits to achieve a solidarity with nature, within one’s self, and with others that goes beyond the human condition towards the artistic ideal, however tentative and tenuous. The same can be said for the act of reading, in which we often appear to seize the message of a profound work like La montagne secrète, at the very moment that it eludes us, a sort of perpetual ‘Paradis perdu,’ to borrow the final words of Marie Grenier-Francœur,29 which resonate with the title of Anne Hébert’s Le premier jardin, another artist’s identitary quest, to which we turn in the next chapter.

Chapter Nine

From Confinement to Constellation: Le premier jardin

Like Gabrielle Roy’s La montagne secrète (chapter eight), Anne Hébert’s novel Le premier jardin (1988) casts as its main character an artist figure in quest of identity.1 In both cases, whatever meaning the protagonist discovers is encased in memory and emerges through an encounter with the landscape, mediated by art. In the case of Roy’s painter Pierre, origins are found in nature; for Hébert’s actress Flora, on the other hand, identity is housed in the city, a repository of memories, which she initially seeks to avoid, but ultimately must confront. Set in 1976, in the wake of the Quiet Revolution and in the midst of the women’s liberation movement in Quebec, Hébert’s novel depicts national, gender, and personal identity as inextricably entwined and ultimately culminating in a constellation of multiple, even contradictory, points. An Identitary Mystery The question (if not yet quest) of identity is posed from the outset of Le premier jardin, since the main character is unnamed in the first sentence and identified by two different names in the second sentence: her legal name – Pierrette Paul – and her stage name – Flora Fontanges (9). Not only does her status as an actress further complicate matters, since she plays multiple roles and assumes theatrical identities through method acting, but her legal name is also problematic, since she was named for the saints of her birth day, Pierre and Paul, a common occurrence for first names, but hardly for last names, which are normally inherited from one’s parents and then serve as markers of family and ethnic origin. In short, the possibility that the protagonist is an orphan is suggested from the start for the vigilant reader, left in dim light if not total

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darkness by the third-person, present-tense narrator, whose information is limited to that which passes through the main character’s centre of consciousness.2 The limited nature of the narrator, powerless to identify what the character cannot or will not raise to consciousness, thus itself reinforces the problem of identity in this complex and profound novel. Not only is the main character not identifiable with any certainty, but also her destination, a faraway city in the New World to which she has been summoned by two letters of unspecified origin, is not identified, nor will it be in the course of the novel because no doubt it’s a dreaded place where she had sworn to never again set foot (10), despite or perhaps due to the fact that it’s her birth city. The separate letters that coincidentally occasion this broken vow, we learn in due course as they cross her field of consciousness, come from a director proposing the role of Winnie in Beckett’s Oh! les beaux jours (Happy Days) and from her daughter Maud, whom she hasn’t seen in a year. Upon her arrival, someplace in North America, Flora is greeted by the director, but not by her mysteriously missing daughter, and the reader is confronted by the first of many partial descriptions that allow us to construct the city and, for those familiar with it (that is, through memory), its identity: Il n’y a plus de gare. Une baraque en plein champ en tient lieu. Le train s’arrête dans un terrain vague … La nuit. La rase campagne. Au loin, des guirlandes de lumière dessinent des rues. La nuit partout. Quelques taxis immobiles sur une file. Des éphémères dansent dans le rayon des phares … A chaque éclat de néon signalant un motel ou un poulet barbecue, elle ferme les yeux. Voudrait se fondre dans la nuit. Anywhere out of this world. Son angoisse est de ne pas sentir la vie où elle se trouve. Et, en même temps, cela l’arrange. Tout ce qu’elle espère, c’est qu’il ne se produise rien (ni heurt ni émotion) entre la ville et elle, avant son arrivée à l’hôtel, rue Sainte-Anne. Elle ne veut pas se souvenir que sa fausse grand-mère habitait la vieille ville et qu’il fallait franchir l’enceinte des murs pour aller déjeuner chez elle, tous les dimanches. [13; There is no train station now. A shed in the middle of a field stands in its place. The train stops in a vacant lot ... Night. Open country. Garlands of light trace distant streets. On all sides, night. Taxis in line, motionless. Mayflies dance in headlights’ beams … At every flash of neon that indicates a motel or barbequed chicken, she shuts her eyes. Wishes she could melt into the night. Anywhere out of this world. Is anxious because she feels there is no life here, where she is at the

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moment. At the same time, it suits her. She only hopes there will be no reaction (no clash, no emotion) between the city and herself before she arrives at the hotel on rue Sainte-Anne. She does not want to remember that her false grandmother used to live in the old city, that she had to go through the walls on her way to her house for lunch every Sunday. (5–6)]

The passage begins with a negative temporal expression (‘il n’y a plus de gare’), which underscores the changes brought on by the passage of time and Flora’s keen consciousness of it, key themes throughout the novel. The ensuing sentences contain a series of impressions of vast space (‘en plein champ … un terrain vague’), as if filtered through the character’s perception, limited by darkness to a few snapshots, conveyed by the staccato rhythm of elliptical sentences (‘La nuit. La rase campagne’). As with the many landscapes we have examined, this cityscape begins to fill in with details of light and line (‘des guirlandes de lumière dessinent des rues’), before focusing on various places, intuited by reading signs (‘éclat de néon signalant un motel’). Perception of specific details is impeded by Flora’s refusal to look (‘elle ferme les yeux’) and voluntary alienation from her surroundings, punctuated by a direct quote from Baudelaire (‘Anywhere out of this world’), all the more alienating as it is in English and in italics.3 Her desire to avoid remembering particular places – ‘Elle ne veut pas se souvenir que sa fausse grand-mère habitait la vieille ville et qu’il fallait franchir l’enceinte des murs’ – nonetheless provides us with clues concerning the identity of Flora (‘sa fausse grand-mère’ suggests that she was indeed adopted) and that of the city (there is but one walled city in North America: Quebec). The passage is thus typical both of the intermingling of the cityscape and the character’s identity and of the partial, progressive construction of both, despite Flora’s determination to repress personal memories by avoiding certain places, negative sites of memory, associated with them and by escaping through art, here a passage from Baudelaire, later her theatrical roles. As Flora awakens from her first night’s sleep in the new city, she is obliged to construct her identity (in the simplest, most functional sense) from the perception of her surroundings: Longtemps elle a dormi très tard, dans des chambres inconnues, dans des villes étrangères. Durant de longues années, elle a éprouvé l’effarement de celle qui se réveille dans le noir et qui ne sait plus où elle se trouve. De là à ne pas savoir qui elle était, l’espace d’un instant, la panique était complète.

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Elle a pourtant l’habitude. Tout finit par s’arranger. Il suffit de refaire l’ordre de la chambre, avant même d’ouvrir les yeux. Bien s’assurer des points de repère précis. [15; For a long time she slept very late, in strange rooms, foreign cities. For many years she experienced the trepidation of a woman awaking in the dark, unsure where she is. Utter panic at not knowing, for a moment, who she is. Now she’s used to it though. Everything works out in the end. She just has to retrace the order of objects in the room before she even opens her eyes. Determine some precise reference points. (7)]

Again the prose, representing Flora’s consciousness, reverberates with echoes of literary ancestors, here Proust’s famous novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, which begins with ‘Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure’ and where the narrator experiences similar anguish before reconstructing the various layers of his past and present rooms and thus the architecture of his identity.4 Here Flora is content to construct a present, functional identity by specific, concrete reference points (‘points de repère précis’) in order precisely to avoid the past, leading to a lack of personality structure, which accounts no doubt for her panic. Nonetheless, the link between the memory of place (‘où elle se trouve’) and identity (‘qui elle était’) is undeniable, although experienced negatively here by the anxiety-ridden Flora. As she looks out of the window from her hotel room onto the rue Sainte-Anne, Flora is distracted by the vivid scenery: ‘La petite place sous sa fenêtre est éclaboussée de soleil. Des calèches fraîchement lavées, les roues rouges luisantes d’eau, les chevaux, le nez dans leurs picotins d’avoine … C’est le présent à son heure la plus vive. Toutes les cloches de la ville sonnent l’angélus, qui mieux mieux, en grosses rafales sonores. Le canon de la citadelle tonne midi. Les habitants de la haute ville règlent leurs montres et leurs horloges sur le canon de la citadelle.’ (15–16; The little square under her window is spattered with sunlight. Freshly washed calèches, their red wheels glistening with water, horses with their noses in bags of oats … This is the present at its liveliest. All the church bells in the city compete as they sound the angelus, great gusts of sound. The canon at the Citadel thunders noon. The inhabitants of the upper town set their watches and clocks by that canon [7].)5 In addition to furnishing the reader with several more reference points concerning the city’s landmarks (‘la citadelle’) and its topography (‘la haute ville’), there is, despite Flora’s judgment that ‘c’est le présent à son heure la plus vive,’ something clearly anachronistic in the presence of the horse-drawn carriages and something definitely theatrical about

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their appearance (‘fraîchement lavées’). The set-like setting reminds us of the novel’s epigraph, ‘All the world’s a stage’ (7), from Shakespeare’s As You Like It (act two, scene seven), an impression conveyed also by the contemporary painter Raynald Leclerc in his painting of the rue SainteAnne, titled S’éclate la lumière (bursting with sunlight) (plate 13), an expression that resonates well with Hébert’s ‘éclaboussée de lumière’ (splashed with sunlight). In his book of paintings, Au cœur du Vieux-Québec, Leclerc takes the reader/viewer on a tour of the city’s landmarks, during which he underscores their historical significance. For the rue Sainte-Anne, for example, he notes, ‘“un peu de rouge et un peu de poudre sur tes joues et te voilà lumineuse de beauté…” Sur cette rue, aujourd’hui piétonnière, on a construit en 1790 la première salle de spectacle de Québec’ (52; a touch of red, a little powder on your cheeks, and your beauty will shine. This street, today reserved for pedestrians, was home to Quebec City’s first real playhouse). The rue Sainte-Anne is thus not only the site of the city’s first theatre, but Leclerc also sees it as decked out like an actress, certainly a fitting point of reference and return for Flora Fontanges during her peregrinations throughout the city. For Leclerc, the thick paint, applied in broad strokes with a spatula, mimics the ‘mascara’ that adorns the street, personified as an actress, and despite the vertical blocking used to capture the closed-in feeling of the street, the open foreground with piles of snow in alternating purple and white strokes, picked up in the buildings, lends the street the luminous effect alluded to in the painting’s title. In effect, the uneven application of paint not only captures the varied texture of the undulating snow piles, but it also reflects light off the surface of the canvas in dazzlingly different ways. If the Impressionists can be said to use light to dissolve matter, for Leclerc, light itself has a material quality imparted by the heavy impasto and vivid colours, which has led Michel Blois to title a recent article on Leclerc ‘Sculpter la lumière’ (112; sculpting light). Disturbed by the absence of Maud, a perennial runaway (18), Flora meets with her daughter’s lover, Raphaël, at a cafe on a major thoroughfare, la Grande-Allée, again a recognizable landmark of Quebec City: La Grande-Allée, dans ses oripeaux de théâtre, s’allonge jusqu’à la porte Saint-Louis … Ni naissances ni morts (sauf accident) à l’intérieur des maisons de pierre badigeonnées de couleur. Mais où sont les gens? Les vrais. Ceux qui ont eu vie liée avec les boiseries sombres, les sous-sols incommodes, les escaliers tuants, les étages empilés, les cheminées ronflantes. Se

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sont-ils retirés, dorment-ils de leur dernier sommeil, murés dans la pierre de taille de leurs demeures, aux larges bow windows? Flora Fontanges craint plus que toute autre chose de réveiller des fantômes et d’avoir à jouer un rôle parmi les spectres. Elle presse le pas, marche de plus en plus vite. Comme si on pouvait la joindre à la course. Évite soigneusement de passer la porte Saint-Louis. Ne verra pas aujourd’hui les façades grises de l’Esplanade ni la haute demeure de sa fausse grand-mère qu’on a transformée en hôtel. En passant près des anciens tennis du parlement, la vue des montagnes et du ciel, au loin, un instant, lui entre dans le coeur par surprise. [21–2; The Grande-Allée with its tawdry theatrical finery extends as far as the St. Louis Gate … No births or deaths (except for accidents) inside the stone houses daubed with colour. But where are the people? The real ones? Those whose lives are tied to the dark woodwork, the nasty cellars, the exhausting staircases, the stacked-up storeys, the roaring fireplaces. Have they gone away, are they sleeping their final sleep walled up inside these stone mansions with their broad bow windows? More than anything else, Flora Fontanges is afraid of awakening phantoms, of having to play a role among ghosts. She quickens her pace, strides faster and faster. As if she too could join the race. Carefully avoids the St. Louis Gate. Will not see today the grey house fronts of the Esplanade or the tall mansion of her false grandmother, which they have transformed into a hotel. As she walks past the old tennis courts of the parliament buildings, the sight of the distant mountains and sky briefly, surprisingly, touches her heart. (13 –14)]

The opening comparison of the Grande-Allée to a theatre extends this recurrent verbal and visual metaphor; in essence, as suggested by the novel’s epigraph, the city becomes the stage on which the character’s psychodrama will play itself out and from which, eventually, we’ll catch the conscience of the actress.6 Already, early in ‘act one,’ the reader discerns a certain pattern in the setting/sets, as the houses on the Grande-Allée, like that of the ‘fausse grand-mère’ on the nearby and even more elegant Esplanade, have been ‘transformed’ from their past identities into a more modern usage (‘transformée en hôtel’), just as the city’s railway station has been displaced. The nested analogy of the city to the houses within it extends further to the walls encompassing both (‘murés dans la pierre de taille’) and masking mysteries of identity: ‘Mais où sont les gens? Les vrais.’ The inquisitive Flora, ironically but consistently, refuses to question her own past by avoiding the gate (‘la porte Saint-Louis’) that leads through the walls and towards her own truths. Raynald Leclerc expresses a similar

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sense of mystery in his commentary on the painting, Fleuron néo-gothique. La porte Saint-Louis (figure 9.1): ‘Les lieux de passage de notre ville contri-buent à son charme secret et quelque peu mystérieux.’ (57; Our city’s entranceways fuel its secret, somewhat mysterious charm.) Here, Leclerc captures this aura of mystery surrounding the SaintLouis gate by the shadows and blurred details in the far ground and an oblique viewpoint that averts a clear view down the street, which changes its name and identity from the modernized Grande-Allée, where the would-be spectator is positioned, to the ancient rue Saint-Louis, on the other side of the gate. He also heightens the sense of the past by the heavy application of paint, into which he then etches lines to suggest the separate flagstones in the foreground and the mortar-filled depressions between the stones in the time-worn walls, as well as by the single anachronistic carriage with no signs of the many automobiles and tour busses that usually occupy the modern scene. This highlighting of a central place against surrounding space is typical of Leclerc’s approach to painting, as Robert Filion notes in his introduction to Au cœur du Vieux-Québec: ‘Be it a garden, building, street or square, Leclerc’s compositions are often constructed as follows: Dark shadow and bright light in the foreground opening into a passage leading to a specific esthetic space. This framework invites the viewer to a well-lit centre of interest, to which the eye is drawn … a wall, bell tower or tree. The background constitutes a landscape, an atmosphere more evocative than defined, an impression rather than a description’ (6). From Leclerc’s painting, coupled with the passage from Hébert’s novel, we begin to glimpse the thematic possibilities configured by the city: with its new appearance surrounding a past identity enclosed by walls, accessible by a few gateways, the city mirrors not only Flora’s situation (protecting a past she refuses to explore) but also that of the Quebecois nation (once set on repressing the bitter memory of the Conquest, but now determined to discover the gateways to memory and thus preserve the past in order to move forward).7 A similar mixture of personal and national past provided the impetus for Leclerc’s book: ‘Cela invitait à remonter le temps pour y retrouver les sources de l’inspiration première; cela voulait dire retourner là où tout a commencé, autour de la Place d’Armes, au cœur du Vieux-Québec, revoir les lieux, les endroits, les points de vue, qui les premiers, ont inspiré mon travail des premières années.’ (3; This anniversary bid me go back in time to rediscover my original sources of inspiration, to return to where it all began – Place d’Armes, the heart of Old Quebec – to revisit

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9.1 Raynald Leclerc, Fleuron néo-gothique. La porte Saint-Louis, 2003. Huile sur toile, 20 x 24 pouces. Avec la permission de Sylvie Bourget, Galerie d’Art Internationale. Photo: Louis Charbonneau / Neo-Gothic Jewel. The Saint-Louis Gate, 2003. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Sylvie Bourget, Galerie d’Art Internationale. Photo: Louis Charbonneau.

the venues and vistas that most fueled my imagination in the early years [3].) The Place d’Armes lies precisely at the end of the rue SaintLouis that we glimpse through the gate, which Leclerc is as determined to pursue as Flora is to avoid. In the passage above from Hébert’s novel, Flora refuses to look at the gate, but focuses instead on the vast surrounding space of nature: ‘la vue des montagnes et du ciel, au loin, un instant, lui entre dans le coeur par surprise.’ Hébert’s juxtaposition of

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urban and natural space for psychological purposes – which takes on a historical cast in other descriptive passages, such as ‘l’ébauche de la ville plantée dans la sauvagerie de la terre’ (95; the sketch of a city planted in the wildness of the earth [74]) – is also a major component of Leclerc’s perception of the urban setting: ‘À Québec l’horizon de la montagne n’est jamais très loin, une jolie montagne bleue, rarement sombre, elle fait partie intégrante du paysage au même titre que le fleuve.’ (62; In Quebec City, the mountains are always on the horizon, close by, blue, sunlit, they are as typical of the landscape as is the River [62].) This combination of a cultural place set against natural space sounds a familiar note in Quebec landscape representation and shows that Leclerc is as faithful to his heritage through his compositional technique as through his choice of subject. Indeed, in 2004–5 Leclerc won the prestigious ‘Art et Nature’ competition in Baie-Saint-Paul, the longstanding artistic capital of Charlevoix, and in fact in 2007, the village was named the ‘Capitale Culturelle du Canada.’ Leclerc thus assumes his place in an illustrious lineage of artists who have resided or worked extensively in Baie-Saint-Paul, including Gagnon, Richard, Brymner, Cullen, Lemieux, Savard, Roy, and Hébert herself, to mention only those featured so far in the present book. To return, on the other hand, to the contrasting avoidance of heritage practised by Flora Fontanges, Anne Hébert has not, of course, brought her main character back to her city of origins in order to allow her to repel them, and despite Flora’s resolutions, as she roams the city with Raphaël and other friends of Maud, she inevitably encounters the dreaded former mansion of the ‘false’ grandmother and bits of the memories it houses: Ce qui devait arriver, arrive à l’instant même. Voici l’Esplanade, la façade grise, les fenêtres qu’on a peintes en bleu, du 45 de la rue d’Auteuil. Aucune vie ancienne ne peut sans doute persister à l’intérieur. On pourrait cogner avec un doigt sur la pierre. Le vide seul. L’écho du vide. Le creux de la pierre. Le passé changé en caillou. Nulle grande vieille femme en noir ne risque d’apparaître à la fenêtre et de soulever un rideau de guipure pour épier Flora Fontanges, la montrer du doigt. Nulle vieille voix sèche ne peut s’échapper de la fenêtre et prononcer l’arrêt de mort d’une petite fille rescapée de l’hospice Saint-Louis: –Vous n’en ferez jamais une lady. Flora Fontanges se dit qu’il n’y a pas pire sourde que celle qui ne veut pas entendre. [30; At that very moment the inevitable occurs. Here is the Esplanade, and the grey façade, the window-frames now painted blue, of

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45 rue d’Auteuil. Surely no past life can still persist inside. Tap the stone with a finger. There is only emptiness. The echo of emptiness. Hollow stone. The past now a mere pebble. There’s no risk that a tall old woman in black will appear at the window and lift a curtain of guipure lace to spy on Flora Fontanges and point at her. No harsh old woman’s voice can seep out the window and pronounce a death sentence on a little girl who was rescued from the Hospice Saint-Louis. ‘You’ll never make a lady of her.’ Flora Fontanges tells herself that no one is more deaf than she who does not want to hear. (21)]

The passage is typical in its brilliant involvement of the reader in this identitary mystery. In activating segments of Flora’s memory, Hébert simultaneously engages the reader’s own by obliging us to remember that ‘les façades grises de l’Esplanade’ (20) denote the former house of the ‘fausse grand-mère,’ who must, then, be the ‘vieille femme en noir,’ which in turn leads the reader to deduce that Flora herself is the ‘petite fille.’ At the same time as she gratifies the reader’s deductive skills, Hébert rewards us by confirming earlier conjectures that Flora had been adopted, since she is ‘rescapée de l’hospice Saint-Louis,’ presumably an orphanage. Furthermore, Hébert manages to pique the reader’s curiosity since her ‘answers’ invariably provoke further questions, such as the nature of the predicament from which Flora was ‘rescued’ (simply by finding a family or by escaping a disaster?) and the meaning of the phrase ‘Vous n’en ferez jamais une lady’ (who is designated by the pronouns ‘vous’ and ‘en’?). Moreover and especially, Hébert engages the reader through irony by revealing the protagonist’s penchant for selfcontradiction, thereby enabling the author to break through the barriers of a narrative form limited to Flora’s consciousness; at the very moment Flora tells herself there is no risk of the old woman appearing, she does so in a precise image, through memory. Finally, the passage ends with the beginning of a realization on Flora’s part that the deafest person is she who will not listen, which shows the seeds of self-knowledge if not (yet) the fruits of listening to the voices of her past. A similar attempt at avoidance fails when Flora, about to visit the city with Raphaël as her guide (a trade he plies to sustain his studies in history), eliminates ‘forbidden’ areas associated with her past, such as the Côte de la Couronne and the quartier Saint-Roch (37). Flora expresses no such fear of the rue Plessis, since it no longer exists (37), only to have it arise from the ashes of memory in an image from the past of excruciating detail, especially a cut-glass doorknob. From this image springs,

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like all of Combray from Proust’s teacup (yet in Flora’s case unwillingly), ‘tout l’appartement de M. et Mme Éventurel qui ont adopté une petite fille rescapée de l’hospice Saint-Louis.’ (38; the whole apartment of M. and Mme Éventurel, who have adopted a little girl who was rescued from the Hospice Saint-Louis [26].) The episode thus further confirms the earlier hypothesis of adoption, while adding a family name to the earlier passage (30), but holds back, for the moment, until it will also reach Flora’s consciousness, additional information regarding the ‘escape’ and the significance of the door handle. The subsequent city tour is punctuated with descriptions of reference points that enable the reader to further map the city: ‘L’éclat de midi sur toutes choses. La haute ville dressé sur son cap, verte et chevelue comme une campagne, à la crête des murs, là où la citadelle est juchée contre le ciel. En bas, le parc des Champs-de-Bataille. En contrebas, le fleuve, d’allure océane, à l’odeur de vase, d’huile et de goudron, baigne des quais moussus.’ (41; The midday glare on all things. The upper town held up by its cape, covered with green tufts like the countryside, there at the crest of the walls where the Citadel is perched against the sky. Below the Plains of Abraham. And beneath it the river, oceanic here, and smelling of mud, oil, and tar, bathes moss-covered wharves [28].) In addition to the topographical mapping suggested by the numerous spatial references (‘sur,’ ‘là,’ ‘contre,’ ‘en bas,’ ‘en contrebas’), the specific cultural place set off against the vast natural space (‘la citadelle est juchée contre le ciel’) serves also to map the city historically by bringing to mind and memory the British Conquest (‘la citadelle’) on the Plains of Abraham (‘le parc des Champs-de-Bataille’), ‘au cours de laquelle, en 1759, on a perdu la ville et tout le pays’ (30; the 1759 battle, scarcely a few minutes long, in the course of which the city and the entire country were lost [21]). The day and, one might say, first act come to a close on the Dufferin Terrace, the cliff-top boardwalk overlooking the lower city: La terrasse Dufferin déverse sa foule nocturne sous le ciel d’été. Ceux de la haute ville rejoignent ceux de la basse ville, sur la promenade de bois. Deux courants se rencontrent, se heurtent et se mêlent sur les planches sonores, pareils au mouvement du fleuve lorsque les eaux douces rejoignent les eaux salées, se brouillent un instant et suivent leur cours saumâtre. [44; A confused stamping of hooves on planks, the warmth and sound of passing lives. Dufferin Terrace pours out its nocturnal crowd under the summer sky. People from the upper town join those from the lower town

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on the wooden promenade. Two currents meet, collide and mingle on the resonant boards, like the movement of the river when sweet water meets salt, briefly blurring, then each follows its briny course. (30)]

Under the coinciding signs of verticality (‘sous’), immensity (‘le ciel’), multiplicity (‘la foule’), binarity (‘haute ville … basse ville’), and hybridity (the fresh water mixes with the salt water, just as the residents of the upper city and the lower city mingle together), the description also marks a transition in the story, as Flora’s meanderings take her increasingly to the lower city, the site of the city’s origins, and thus, perhaps, deeper into her own.8 The Lower City The lower city, like la Grande-Allée, is saturated with the past and similarly compared to a theatrical set: ‘Elle est seule au bord du fleuve dans la partie basse de la ville, là où tout a commencé il y a trois siècles. Cela ressemble à un décor de théâtre.’ (49; She is alone by the side of the river in the lower part of the city, where everything began three centuries ago. It resembles a theatre set [34].) Moreover and more pointedly, aided by Raphaël’s knowledge of history, Flora will spontaneously invent, then play, a series of historical roles, not to explore her own origins but precisely to escape from having to do so. Role-playing enables Flora not only to avoid images of Maud that begin to assail her (49–50), but also to assume identities other than her own: ‘Elle cherche un nom de femme à habiter. Pour éclater de nouveau dans la lumière.’ (49; She is seeking a woman’s name to inhabit. To shine forth anew in the light [34].) In bursting into light, however, she relegates large segments of her own history to darkness. In a later moment of heightened consciousness (and Hébert repeatedly invites the reader to superimpose passages separated by the temporality of the text), Flora acknowledges the repressive value of the roles, both theatrical and historical, that she continuously, impulsively plays: ‘Tant qu’elle jouera un rôle, sa mémoire se tiendra tranquille et ses propres souvenirs de joie ou de peine ne serviront qu’à nourrir des vie étrangères.’ (106; As long as she is playing a part, her memory will be at rest and her own recollections of joy or sorrow will serve only to nourish lives other than hers [85].) Ironically (and skilfully managed by Hébert), however, the very roles that Flora musters to mask her memories of joy and sorrow, serve, on

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the contrary, to reveal them, both to the reader and ultimately to Flora herself. Indeed, the resemblance between Flora’s situation and that of the characters she plays is sometimes so great as to cause several critics to speak of ‘mise en abyme,’ a nested structure where the ‘play within the play’ mirrors and illuminates some aspect of the larger play that encompasses it.9 Hébert herself stresses ‘la logique interne de l’œuvre’ (‘Poésie,’ 62; the internal logic of the work), and certainly what her novel lacks in chronological clarity, it more than makes up for in logical, analogical, and especially archaeological solidity. The mechanism of role-playing is generally the same: Raphaël mentions the name of an early habitante, a seventeenth-century woman settler; he and Flora lend her an age, a civil status, a family, and an address in the lower city, which they visit; then Flora immerses herself in the character and plays out a role she imagines in detail. It is from these details that the reader deduces the very fears and desires that the role is ostensibly meant to hide. Barbe Abbadie, for example, is a pregnant shop owner with four children and a husband who adores her, a situation that would seem anathema to Flora, who nonetheless authors it, acts it out, and revels in it (during the ‘scene’ she begins to flirt with Raphaël). Her explanation – ‘Rassure-toi, mon petit Raphaël, tout ça, c’est du théâtre’ (53; Don’t worry, Raphaël dear, it’s only theatre [38]) – is more ironic than reassuring, since it is in fact the theatre that holds the truth, albeit in disguised form. More recognizable is the name of Marie Rollet, the first habitante of the new colony and wife of Louis Hébert, an onomastic, not to mention cultural, ancestor of the novelist. It is in their ‘scene’ that the meaning of the novel’s title is revealed,10 in a passage contrasting their Frenchstyle garden (‘le premier jardin’) with the surrounding wilderness, whose visual qualities we examined in the introduction to this book: Est-ce donc si difficile de faire un jardin, en pleine forêt, et de l’entourer d’une palisade comme un trésor? Le premier homme s’appelait Louis Hébert et la première femme, Marie Rollet. Ils ont semé le premier jardin avec des graines qui venaient de France. Ils ont dessiné le jardin d’après cette idée de jardin, ce souvenir de jardin dans leur tête, et ça ressemblait à s’y méprendre à un jardin de France, jeté dans la forêt du Nouveau Monde. Des carottes, des salades, des poireaux, des choux bien alignés, en rangs serrés, tirés au cordeau, parmi la sauvagerie de la terre tout alentour. Quand le pommier, ramené d’Acadie par M. de Mons, et transplanté, a enfin donné des fruits, c’est devenu le premier de tous les jardins du

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monde, avec Adam et Ève devant le pommier. Toute l’histoire du monde s’est mise à recommencer à cause d’un homme et d’une femme plantés en terre nouvelle. [76–7; Is it so difficult then to make a garden in the middle of the forest, and to surround it with a palisade like a treasure-trove? The first man was called Louis Hébert, the first woman Marie Rollet. They sowed the first garden with seeds that came from France. They laid out the garden according to the notion of a garden, the memory of a garden, that they carried in their heads, and it was almost indistinguishable from a garden in France, flung into a forest in the New World. Carrots, lettuces, leeks, cabbages, all in a straight line, in serried ranks along a taut cord, amid the wild earth all around. When the apple tree brought here from Acadia by Monsieur de Mons and transplanted finally yielded its fruit, it became the first of all gardens in the world, with Adam and Eve standing before the Tree. The whole history of the world was starting afresh because of a man and a woman planted in this new earth. [59–60])

In addition to the opposition of nature (‘en pleine forêt’) and culture (‘le jardin’), examined in the introduction, we witness the role of memory (‘ce souvenir de jardin’) in soldering links between the present and different periods of the past. Raynald Leclerc invokes the same sense of cultural ancestry, embodied by a tree in a garden, situated in the left foreground of his painting Regard d’un parc tranquille. Le parc Montmorency (figure 9.2), where now stand neighbouring statues of Louis Hébert (sowing seeds) and Marie Rollet (with her children), behind the vantage point chosen by the painter. The importance of the past and its link to place is evident in Leclerc’s commentary on the painting: ‘ce fut notre première terre, celle que Louis Hébert a ensemencée, puis celle de notre premier évêque: Monseigneur de Laval, puis en 1792, le lieu du premier parlement du Canada … aujourd’hui c’est un parc où vont flâner les amoureux.’ (23; Our first tract of farmland, seeded by Louis Hébert; then the building of our first bishop: Monseigneur de Laval; then, in 1792, the site of the first Parliament of Canada; today, a park where lovers stroll [23].) Not only is Leclerc’s expression ‘première terre’ remarkably similar to the title of Hébert’s novel, but the image is similarly laden with layers of the past, not only those now visually absent but mnemonically present, recalled by Leclerc’s caption, but those that extend beyond the park in the foreground and beyond the eighteenth century. From the striking tree in the left foreground the eye moves diagonally to the elegant Empire-style building in the right middle ground, the post office – erected in 1871 on

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9.2 Raynald Leclerc, Regard d’un parc tranquille. Le parc Montmorency, 2003. Huile sur toile, 30 x 24 pouces. Avec la permission de Sylvie Bourget, Galerie d’Art Internationale. Photo: Louis Charbonneau / Look of a Peaceful Park. The Montmorency Park, 2003. Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Sylvie Bourget, Galerie d’Art Internationale. Photo: Louis Charbonneau.

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the site of the legendary Hôtel du Chien d’Or (whose original bas-relief is embedded on one of the building’s frontals as a reminder of its heritage) – now named for Louis-Stephan Saint-Laurent, prime minister of Canada from 1948–57. Led now diagonally from right to left by the building’s facade and upward by the path and stairway banister, the eye ascends in the vertically ordered and intricately conceived picture space to the far ground, where it encounters the imposing Château Frontenac, a luxury hotel constructed in 1893 and since then the visual emblem of Quebec City. The building’s chateau style (originating in the French Renaissance) has influenced numerous other structures, including the Gare du Palais railroad station vacated at the time of Flora’s return to Quebec. Named for the Count of Frontenac, a governor of New France famous for his defiance of the British during the siege of 1690, the present hotel occupies the site of Champlain’s Fort Louis (1620) and Frontenac’s residence (1692), traces of which were unearthed in an archaeological dig begun in 1985. One might even say that the archaeological site is an apt analogy for both Leclerc’s painting and Hébert’s novel. Leclerc’s compression of a series of past events into the same place, ultimately leading to the present (‘aujourd’hui’) in his text – along with the superimposition of landmarks from various points in the past in his intricate painting – not only correspond with Gérard Namer’s description of the process of commemoration (chapter two) but also mirror the movement of the novel, in which the ‘premier jardin’ episode from the seventeenth century, conflated with the story of the garden of Eden from the biblical past, brings out issues of origins and maternity (‘elle est la mère du pays,’ 79; she is the mother of the country [61]) that reflect both Flora’s past, as motherless orphan, and present, as momentarily childless mother. This obsessive thematic cluster in the novel of sexuality, maternity, and origins recurs in an episode involving the filles du Roy (King’s daughters), a cargo of young women of poor means dowered by King Louis XIV to leave France for the New World in order to marry and populate the colony. For Flora, the filles du Roy are not only duly adopted daughters (of the king no less) but also further mother figures, fostering a nostalgia for her own personal and cultural origins, not only national but mythical: ‘En réalité c’est d’elle seule qu’il s’agit, la reine aux mille noms, la première fleur, la première racine, Ève en personne (non plus seulement incarnée par Marie Rollet, épouse de Louis Hébert), mais fragmentée en mille frais visages.’ (99–100; In reality, it concerns her alone, the queen with a thousand names, the first flower,

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first root, Eve in person (no longer embodied solely by Marie Rollet, wife of Louis Hébert), but fragmented now into a thousand fresh faces [78–9].)11 As the roles and identities multiply and superimpose themselves, rather than carry Flora farther away from herself, they bring her a heightened awareness of their relevance to her own situation. As she reflects on the filles du Roy, for example, she relates them to her own past: ‘Inutile de chercher parmi les mères du pays la mère qu’elle n’a jamais connue. Orpheline dès le premier cri et la première respiration, Flora Fontanges n’a que faire ici parmi les filles du Roy, ressucitées grâce à la fantaisie d’un étudiant en histoire et d’une vieille femme dépossédée de sa propre mère, depuis la nuit du temps.’ (100; It is pointless to search among the mothers of this country for the mother she has never known. Orphaned from her first cry and first breath, Flora Fontanges has no business here among the filles du Roy, revived through the imagination of a history student and of an old woman who has been bereft of her own mother from the dawn of time [79].) Flora’s denial of their significance is belied by the very confrontation with her own situation that they have produced in her, as evidenced in the final phrases of the passage. I cannot stress enough the significance of these roles and the places in which they occur in revealing not only Flora’s personal identity but also the French-Canadian national identity, itself often seen as repressed, even ‘orphaned’ by the abandonment of the ‘motherland’ (‘fatherland’ earlier: see chapters three and four), until the Quiet Revolution in the sixties, just before the time frame of the novel’s story (1976), which brought to the fore the expression, now the national motto, ‘je me souviens’ (I remember), coined, moreover, by the famous architect Eugène-Étienne Taché, Anne Hébert’s maternal grandfather! This lesson of history and heritage, embraced on a national level by the ‘Québécois,’ as they will henceforth call themselves, is still steadfastly avoided on a personal level by Flora. Flora’s roles also raise the additional broad question of the vulnerability of women’s condition, itself a key issue of the sixties and seventies.12 Foregrounded in the ‘filles du Roy’ episode – ‘leurs jeunes corps voués sans réserve à l’homme, au travail et à la maternité’ (96; their young bodies dedicated unreservedly to man, to work, and to motherhood [75]) – the issue is epitomized in the role of Renée Chauvreux, found dead in the snowy marshes of the île d’Orléans, where, Flora and Raphaël imagine, she had wandered alone to perish rather than marry the husband chosen for her. This reflection on the plight of women,

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dependant on men – ‘la destinée amère des filles’ (105; the bitter destiny of girls [83]) – then leads Flora to her previous theatrical role of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the memory of her lover at the time. From there, it is but a small step in her memory to her title role in Racine’s Phèdre and the resurrection, recounted at Raphaël’s request, of the affair that led to Maud’s birth, despite the wishes of Flora’s lover, Maud’s father, already married, whom Flora would never see again. The increasingly personal revelations prompted by the memory of previous roles culminate with the recollection of the role of Fantine in a theatrical version of Hugo’s novel Les misérables. To better play the role of the prostitute who has to give up her child, the young Flora was forced to plunge into her own past: ‘Flora Fontanges n’aura qu’à puiser dans sa propre enfance, là où elle s’était promis de ne plus remettre les pieds.’ (112; Flora Fontanges can merely draw from her own childhood, go back where she had promised herself never again to set foot [91].) At that time, shortly after Maud’s birth, Flora failed to see the irony that, by immersing herself in the role of Fantine, fed by her own feelings of being abandoned as a child, she initiated a pattern of abandonment of her own child that came to characterize and ruin their relationship. This revelation comes later in her life, but earlier in our reading of the novel in an episode to which we now (re)turn. During Flora’s first visit to the apartment housing the ‘commune’ in which Maud and Raphaël had lived, Flora had noticed a series of posters of herself in previous plays, pinned to the wall and interspersed with newspaper clippings of missing person appeals authored by Flora at various points in the past to hopefully reach the runaway Maud. As is so often the case, the theatrical allusions enable, even oblige Flora to come to a realization about her own past, in this case her stormy relationship with her daughter and why the latter is also presently missing: ‘De là à croire que Maud disparaît dans le noir chaque fois que sa mère monte à nouveau sur une scène, en pleine lumière, face au public qui l’acclame.’ (62; As if it’s clear that Maud vanishes into the dark every time her mother comes back on stage, to face the lights, the cheering audience [45].) Maud’s present departure, like her past ones, is caused then by her mother’s career, not just because Maud must share her with an adoring public, but especially because, in acting, Flora becomes someone else, threatening Maud’s identity as her mother abandons her own. As Flora reflects on this problematic relationship, which, in separating mother and daughter, mirrors her own status as an orphan, she is visited by

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another vivid memory from the past, the apartment on the rue Bourlamaque occupied by the couple who have just adopted her and given her another name: Marie Éventurel. It was at this point in her life that ‘Pierrette Paul’ first had the compelling desire to assume another self, indeed, many other selves: Tout à coup, elle avait envie très fort de devenir quelqu’un d’autre, un de ces passants qui marche dans la neige, par exemple. Son désir le plus profond était d’habiter ailleurs qu’en elle-même … Éclater en dix, cent, mille fragments vivaces; être dix, cent, mille personnes nouvelles et vivaces. Aller de l’une à l’autre, non pas légèrement comme on change de robe, mais habiter profondément un autre être avec ce que cela suppose de connaissance, de compassion, d’enracinement, d’effort d’adaptation et de redoutable mystère étranger. [63–4; Suddenly she felt a great urge to become someone else, one of those passersby walking through the snow, for example. Her deepest desire was to live in some other place than within herself … To shatter into ten, a hundred, a thousand indestructible fragments; to be ten, a hundred, a thousand new and indestructible persons. To go from one to the other, not lightly as one changes dresses, but to inhabit profoundly another being with all the knowledge, the compassion, the sense of rootedness, the efforts to adapt, and the strange and fearsome mystery that would entail. (46–7)]

This passage is a key to the concept of identity expressed in this novel, based (for this character at least, deprived as she is by knowledge of her birth parents) not on the discovery of one’s true ‘self’ but on the coexistence of multiple selves, each one housing its own truth. The self would not have a ‘centre’ around which a stable architecture would be constructed, but would be fragmented into many components, not only as an escape from one’s ‘self,’ but as a discovery of one’s ‘identity’ through the many selves that make up the constellation of luminous points that compose it. It is no doubt this polymorphous concept of identity that explains Hébert’s choice of a third-person narration highly focalized on Flora, rather than a first-person narration, which might imply a centred, singular self. One might say that, as with the city, Flora’s identity is progressively ‘mapped’ by the many points that comprise it. If, then, we transpose this polymorphous concept of personal identity to the national level, as Hébert repeatedly invites us to do, we move towards the notion of multiculturalism now at the forefront of debates in Quebec (chapter ten).13 Not only has this possibility been embedded

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into the novel through the multinational character of Flora’s theatrical roles – British, Irish, and Italian, to name those most relevant to the question of immigration to Quebec – but such a combination has also been configured by the landscape. A mere two paragraphs after the description of the ‘first garden’ Flora and Raphaël ponder the changes brought to it by subsequent generations and waves of immigrants, all of which remain as parts of Quebec’s composite identity: Les enfants et les petits-enfants, à leur tour, ont refait des jardins, à l’image du premier jardin, se servant de graines issues de la terre nouvelle. Peu à peu, à mesure que les générations passaient, l’image mère s’est effacée dans les mémoires. Ils ont arrangé les jardins à leur idée et à l’idée du pays auquel ils ressemblaient de plus en plus. Ils ont fait de même pour les églises et les maisons de ville et de campagne … Les Anglais sont venus, les Écossais et les Irlandais. Ils avaient des idées et des images bien à eux pour bâtir des maisons, des magasins, des rues et des places, tandis que l’espace des jardins reculait vers la campagne. [77–8; The children and grandchildren in their turn remade the gardens in the image of the first one, using seeds that the new earth had yielded. Little by little, as generations passed, the mother image has been erased from their memories. They have arranged the gardens to match their own ideas and to match the idea of the country they come more and more to resemble. They have done the same with churches, and with houses in town and in the country … The English came, and the Scots, and the Irish. They had their own ideas and images for houses, stores, streets, and public squares, while the space for gardens receded into the countryside. (60–1)]

Just as the landscape is no longer purely French, no more so are its inhabitants: neither those of original French origin, nor those who came from other lands, but who nonetheless are part of today’s Quebec. The young Flora does not yet know that she will inevitably become an actress, but she does vow to forge her own name, her own identity, based on multiple, malleable selves: ‘Un jour viendra où elle choisira son propre nom, et ce sera le nom secret, caché dans son cœur, depuis la nuit des temps, le seul et l’unique qui la désignera entre tous et lui permettra toutes les métamorphoses nécessaires à la vie.’ (65; The day will come when she will choose her own name, and it will be the secret name, hidden in her heart since the dawn of time, the one and only name that will designate her among all others, and allow her all the metamorphoses needed for her life [48].) The discovery of that name

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(presumably Flora Fontanges) and thus of her identity (‘qui la désignera’) will have to wait several years for the young woman, while conjectures about its significance for the reader will have to await the novel’s third segment Advancing again to the episode of Fantine, which occasioned our return to the past, the aging Flora is by now fully conscious of the ‘role played’ by acting itself in her desire to assume multiple selves: ‘Il faudrait avoir neuf vies. Les essayer toutes à tour de rôle. Se multiplier neuf fois. Neuf fois neuf fois … Étrange pouvoir de métamorphoses. Le plus beau métier du monde.’ (113–14; She should have nine lives. Try out each one in turn. Multiply herself by nine. Nine times nine … The strange power of metamorphosis. The finest profession in the world [92].) Several stimulating studies highlight Flora’s use of the theatre to cope with the chaos of her existence: Detailing the links unifying ritual, theatre, and procession (458) and tracing Flora’s propensity for mobilizing the spatial configuration of the procession (cortège) to order her memories of people and events, Constantina Mitchell and Paul Côté conclude that ‘de même que le théâtre servait de tampon entre Flora et ce qu’elle ne voulait pas admettre, la puissance ritualisante du cortège l’aide finalement à franchir cette impasse pour affronter momentanément les forces de l’existence et du destin’ (460; just as the theatre served as a buffer between Flora and what she didn’t want to admit, the ritual power of the procession helps her finally to break this impasse in order to momentarily confront the forces of existence and destiny). Daniel Marcheix, citing Flora’s use of theatrical formulas to wrest meaningful discourse from the formless mass that comprises preverbal experience, contends that ‘le jeu théâtral, de nature profondément féminine et maternelle, est ici considéré comme … un véritable creuset matriciel d’insuffler la vie’ (331; theatrical acting, profoundly feminine and maternal in nature, is considered here as a veritable womb-like crucible for infusing life). In both cases, the reconstruction of personal identity, by imposing theatrical order on psychological chaos, would seem to mirror the creation of national identity by imposing culture on nature that we have been witnessing in Quebec landscape representation. Indeed, in an interview from as early as 1960, Hébert herself underscored the intimate link between landscape and identity: ‘La terre que nous habitons depuis trois cents ans est terre du Nord et terre d’Amérique; nous lui appartenons comme la flore et la faune. Le climat et le paysage nous ont façonnés aussi bien que toutes les contingences historiques, culturelles, religieuses et linguistiques.’ (The land that we’ve inhabited for three

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hundred years is Northern and American; we belong to it like the flora and fauna. The climate and landscape have shaped us as much as all the historical, cultural, religious, and linguistic contingencies.)14 In any case, however, it is not the eradication of one component by the other but their interplay that constitutes identity in its fullest sense, a conclusion that Marcheix also reaches regarding Hébert’s work in general: ‘La grande richesse de l’œuvre d’Anne Hébert tient à ce qu’elle ne propose pas d’orgueilleuses ruptures mais bien plutôt des glissements soucieux de ne pas faire l’économie des affrontements et des ambiguités.’ (333–4; The great richness of Anne Hébert’s works consists in her not proposing radical changes but rather slight shifts that are careful to not avoid confrontations and ambiguities.) We further note that Flora’s roles, which she assumes literally à tour de rôle, involve a mixture of historical figures (Marie Rollet), fictional characters (Fantine), and contemporary people (Aurore, to be discussed shortly), each an equally ‘true’ component of her identity, a conflation not as surprising as it might seem, perhaps, when we consider the central place of art in the quest for truth for all artists, including Gabrielle Roy in the previous chapter. In fact, the concept of identity expressed through the character of Flora Fontanges is far more radical than the move from solitude to solidarity made by Pierre Cadorai; more than an extension of the single, solid, stable self towards others, Flora seeks a disintegration of the fragmented self into other, separate yet related selves. But, in this seemingly perfect postmodern personality,15 some selves (the theatrical and the historical) mask others (the personal and the past), thus forming an incomplete constellation, where points of light mask pockets of darkness and cause Flora, despite her resolutions, to keep her distance from others, including her still-missing daughter. Just as the Dufferin Terrace provided a transition from the upper to lower cities, and thus from one segment of the novel to another, the Grande-Allée leads from the new city, through the walls, via la porte Saint-Louis, into the old city and a new phase, the final one, in Flora’s psychodrama. The reader will recall (hopefully, given Hébert’s strategy of activating our memory to match Flora’s growing consciousness of her own) that the Grande-Allée, a thoroughfare decked out like a theatre set, had struck Flora by the transformation of former Victorian mansions into modern cafes and hotels, causing her to ponder the fate of the original occupants (19, 21). Flora’s later perception of the Grande-Allée leads her to a discovery concerning the fate of the dwellings, which, she deduces, were abandoned due to the progressive dis-

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appearance of the maids who maintained them (115). This seemingly general conclusion of sociological import takes on personal and psychological significance as it leads Flora to a recognition about her own past and her debt to her adoptive family: ‘Pierrette Paul échappe à son destin. Elle ne sera jamais bonne à tout faire. N’a-t-elle pas été adoptée en bonne et due forme par M. et Mme Édouard Éventurel?’ (116; Pierrette Paul escapes her destiny. She will never be a maid in someone’s house. Has she not been adopted, according to proper procedures, by M. and Mme Édouard Éventurel? [94]). That fate of the poor female orphan, which would have included losing one’s own last name (116), as in marriage or the convent, is tantamount to losing one’s life, as in the case of Aurore, a maid found raped and killed in a park in 1915, whose story Flora and Raphaël now imagine and act out (117–21). Here again a place, la Grande-Allée, has given rise to a role coupled with a revelation, but unlike the other roles, historical or theatrical, this one is based on true life and is nearer to Flora’s time, as she draws nearer to the truths of her own past in the final part of the novel.16 Down to the Depths and Back up Again When the novelist sends Raphaël away to look for Maud in the surrounding countryside, thus leaving Flora alone, the final stage is set for her unwilling and unwitting quest of the past, through the places that house its heretofore repressed memories: ‘Elle éprouve sa solitude très fort. L’instant ne la porte plus. De là à retourner en esprit à la maison de l’Esplanade, comme s’il n’était plus en son pouvoir de n’y pas aller, appelée par son enfance vivace et têtue.’ (123; She feels intensely alone. The moment no longer supports her. From here she has no choice but to return in spirit to the house on the Esplanade, as if it were no longer in her power not to go there, summoned by her indestructible, stubborn childhood [100].) The novelist again calls on the reader to recall that ‘la maison de l’Esplanade’ was that of the ‘fausse grand-mère,’ whose story we finally learn in full, since Flora will now raise it to consciousness. As Flora, no longer resisting remembrance, sees herself in her grandmother’s mansion on the elegant Esplanade, we finally learn that her ‘escape’ (30, 38) was from a fire at the Saint-Louis orphanage in 1927 (124). We also discover that she had hoped to reforge her identity in her newfound family: ‘Depuis toujours, elle est sans racines et rêve d’un grand arbre, ancré dans la nuit de la terre … son arbre généalogique et son histoire personnelle … La petite fille, sans père ni mère, assise aux

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pieds de la vieille dame, souhaite très fort s’aproprier l’arbre des Éventurel.’ (124; She has been without roots forever and she dreams of a great tree anchored in the night of the earth … her family tree and personal history … The little girl, without father or mother, who sits at the old lady’s feet, longs to appropriate the Éventurels’ tree for herself [101].) Here the tree, ever present in the French-Canadian landscape, emblem of solitude for Pierre Cadorai and sign of fruition for Louis Hébert and Marie Rollet (77), is a symbol of identity for Flora, not the reason for exile from the garden of Eden but the means of recuperating one’s roots.17 These means and thus roots are denied to Flora by her grandmother’s pronouncement to her daughter and son-in-law, Flora’s new parents, that they will never make a lady of her – ‘Vous n’en ferez jamais une lady’ (125) – a recurrent phrase that clarifies an earlier episode for the reader (30) just as it resurrects for Flora the seeds of her resentment. The older Flora now refuses to leave her hotel room, and ‘c’est dans la solitude de la nuit que de grands pans de mémoire cèdent’ (127; in the solitude and the night … broad sweeps of memory give way [104]); as the walls of repression crumble, obscured memories come to light in chain-like fashion, from recent to remote, from disappointing to disastrous, from voluntarily forgotten to traumatically repressed. Recollection of the orphanage fire stemming from the Esplanade scene brings back the names, then faces, then location of her fellow orphans consumed in the conflagration, as she would have been had it not been for an older girl, Rosa, whose name brings tears to Flora, a sort of baptismal fluid that signals her rebirth (128). And from the fire emerge more detailed scenes of the Éventurels’ apartment on the rue Bourlamaque, site of her adoption after the fire and of her scarlet fever, which, along with the trauma of the blaze, now explain her repressed memories – ‘sans passé et sans mémoire’ (130; without past or memory [107]) – and, coupled with her change in name, her loss of identity: ‘Elle n’a pas encore de nom propre, étant entre deux noms.’ (131; She does not yet have her own name, she is between two names [108].) Having breached the wall of repressed memories, the older Flora is now determined to pursue the past: ‘Régler ses comptes avec la nuit, une fois pour toutes. A présent qu’elle est seule dans la ville. Débusquer tous les fantômes. Redevenir neuve et fraîche sur la terre originelle, telle qu’au premier jour, sans mémoire. L’histoire qui vient est sans fil visible, apparemment décousue, vive et brillante, pareille au mercure qui se casse, se reforme et fuit.’ (134; Come to terms with the night, once and for all. Now that she is alone in the city. Flush out all the ghosts. Become

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brand-new and fresh again on the land that gave her birth, as on the first day, without memory. The story to come has no visible thread, is apparently unraveled, gleaming and quick, like mercury which breaks apart, re-forms and flees [110].) For Flora, beset by bad dreams and anxiety, unable to form relationships, even with her daughter, and torn by inner conflict as one set of her selves represses others, the decision to resurrect the past is compelling. The recurrent simile used to describe its mechanism (‘pareille au mercure qui se casse, se reforme et fuit’) conveys not only the modes of Flora’s consciousness but also those of Hébert’s writing and the reader’s experience with the text (see also page 39). The description of Flora’s ‘story’ as ‘sans fil visible, apparemment décousue, vive et brillante’ is, of course, an apt description of Hébert’s own style and thus of the novel itself, making the mercury metaphor a striking marker of ‘metatextuality’ or, to borrow a term from Janet Paterson’s superb study of Hébert’s early novels, ‘self-representation.’18 In other words, the mercury analogy, while ‘representing’ Flora’s consciousness, also suggests the text itself, which thus becomes ‘self-representing’ by displaying its very means, modes, and mechanisms. Anne Hébert has openly acknowledged the analogy between Flora’s creative processes and her own: ‘J’ai essayé de transposer ce que c’est que la création de personnages, pour moi, en décrivant la manière dont Flora Fontanges crée ses rôles.’ (I tried to transpose my way of creating characters by describing Flora Fontanges’ manner of creating roles.)19 Thus Le premier jardin is, in Paterson’s terms, both a ‘representation’ of the actress Flora Fontanges and a ‘self-representation’ of the novelist Anne Hébert. Similarly Raynald Leclerc states from the opening words of his preface that his project of painting scenes from Quebec’s past stems from his desire to recapture and depict his own apprenticeship as an artist, ‘les sources de l’inspiration premère’ (3; my initial sources of inspiration). His landscapes thus ‘represent’ Quebec landmarks while ‘self-representing’ the painter’s struggles to paint them. Moreover, on the most concrete level, akin to Hébert’s mercury metaphor, Leclerc’s use of heavy impasto both represents snow banks on Sainte-Anne street or irregular stone on the Saint-Louis gate, while also bringing the viewer’s attention to the paint itself on the surface of the canvas, and thus to the very act and fact of painting. Certainly this quality of artistic self-consciousness and the foregrounding of artistry are persistent traits of landscape representation in Quebec writing and painting, especially in the twentieth century when art itself becomes the primary conveyer of culture in its intricate interplay with nature.

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In a lengthy segment of the novel’s final act, Flora resurrects the various stages of her social apprenticeship in the Éventurel family at their apartment on the rue Bourlamaque, as she learns more elegant French, excels in school, and plays her first role, that of Marie Éventurel: ‘Elle, qui n’avait jamais vu ni théâtre ni cinéma, voilà qu’elle se trouvait en mesure de jouer le rôle que les Éventurel lui destinaient.’ (137; She who had never seen either theatre or cinema suddenly found herself able to play the part the Éventurels intended for her [113].) Flora now understands the frequent nightmares that her younger self attributed to ‘the wolf’ and that have heretofore haunted her aging self: ‘En réalité, ce sont des petites filles qui passent dans ses songes et qu’on allume comme des torches.’ (144; In reality it is little girls who pass through her dreams, who are set alight like torches [119].) After an accumulation of debts caused by M Éventurel’s poor investments intensified by the advent of the Great Depression (151), the family is obliged to move from its roomy apartment on the rue Bourlamaque to a smaller one on the now defunct rue Plessis, involuntarily glimpsed earlier (38). Flora is now determined to confront her former residence, if only in her memory, which once again produces the image of a glass doorknob (159), which, we now learn, looms so large in Flora’s visual memory because one day it was grasped by her nemesis, the ‘fausse grand-mère,’ who deigned to visit her daughter’s family and offered to have a debutant ball in her mansion on the Esplanade, in honour no less of her previously unwanted and now indigent granddaughter. This unexpected act of good will and good fortune leads to the expected marriage proposal by a wealthy young man, which Marie Éventurel promptly refuses: ‘Je ne veux pas me marier, avec aucun garçon. Je veux faire du théâtre, et j’ai décidé de partir et de me choisir un nom qui soit bien à moi.’ (162; I don’t want to marry, not with any boy. I want to work on stage, and I’ve decided to leave here and choose a name that will be my very own [134].) Despite her adoptive parents’ chagrin, she left and never contacted them again, inflicting her with a persistent sense of guilt (see page 90) and unresolved feelings, perhaps even love, cleansed only now by her commemorative tears (163). The tears recall those shed for Rosa Gaudrault (128), who, along with M and Mme Éventurel, is a parental figure far more essential to Flora’s past roots and present identity, we begin to understand, than the birth parents she never knew. In short, in addition to its many other revelations, Le premier jardin also shows how fundamental or true can be the parental relations conventionally labelled as ‘step’ or ‘false’ (as in ‘la fausse grand-mère’).

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One task remains to fulfil Flora’s vow to ‘affronter seule la ville’ (159; tackle the city alone [131]): revisiting the site of the traumatic fire in the Saint-Roch quarter, which she does by descending via the Côte de la Couronne into the lower city, at night, as if into the depths of her past. The fictive hospice Saint-Louis, like the real-life hospice Saint-Charles on which the episode is based, was consumed by fire in December of 1927.20 Despite the disappearance of the building itself, the very site causes precise images to leave the shadows of the past and surge into Flora’s consciousness: ‘Voici que des images surgissent, à la vitesse du vent, plus rapides que la pensée, une promptitude folle, tandis que les cinq sens ravivés ramènent des sons, des odeurs, des touchers, des goûts amers et que se déchaînent les souvenirs, en flèches précises, tirées des ténèbres, sans répit.’ (167; Now images are looming up at the speed of the wind, faster than thought, a wild quickness, while the five senses, stirred to life, bring sounds, smells, touch, bitter tastes which unloose memories, precise arrows drawn from the shadows, without respite [138].) Having faced the past, Flora is now prepared to face up to her present age (she is nearing sixty despite her penchant for hanging out with Maud’s friends and flirting with Raphaël!) and the aging process represented by the role of Winnie in Beckett’s Oh! les beaux jours, which she had previously put off but now embraces (172). Having thus resurrected the repressed parts of her own personality, Flora is now ready to reach out to others, and, on cue, Hébert brings Maud on stage. The contrite young runaway promptly proposes returning to France with her mother, who, now aware of the fragility of their relationship and that ‘le premier jardin’ lies permanently in the past, is able to ‘faire semblant de croire au retour possible du paradis perdu’ (174; pretend to believe in the possibility of regaining a lost paradise [144]) and to convince Maud that they must wait at least to honour Flora’s contract. Afraid of encountering the unfaithful Raphaël, Maud remains confined to Flora’s hotel room, even when her mother is at rehearsals, until, one day, she declares that she can’t stand being shut up and wants to go out (181), leading her mother on an odyssey through the city’s night spots that ends with Maud’s reconciliation with Raphaël. Flora reluctantly but resolutely accepts her solitude, once again enlightened by a theatrical role: ‘Et c’est Winnie qui parle par la bouche de Flora Fontanges. Cette femme connaît déjà les quatre saisons de la vie alors qu’une saison de surcroît lui est donnée, transfigurant joies et peines quotidiennes, pour en faire une parole véhémente éclatant sur une scène, en pleine

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lumière.’ (185; And it is Winnie who speaks through the mouth of Flora Fontanges. This woman already knows the four seasons of life when an extra season is given to her, transfiguring everyday joys and sorrows to make of them a violent form of speech that bursts on the stage, in full light [154].) The expression ‘cette femme’ is purposely ambivalent, designating both Winnie and Flora, who must assume for a full month on stage the character’s place in a sand pile, suggesting the progressive entrapment imposed on women by their social role and the passage of time. The novel ends with the play’s run, but after Maud and Raphaël have accompanied Flora to the train station, we learn that she has in her pocket a proposal to play yet another role, that of Mme Frola in Pirandello’s Chacun sa vérité (To each his own truth), which ‘lui donne envie de rire et de pleurer, à la fois’ (189; makes her want to laugh and cry at once [156]). To laugh, no doubt, because Frola is an anagram for Flora; to cry, perhaps, because the role is that of a mother separated, like Flora, from her daughter, each of whom has a different version of the truth. On a deeper level, the play’s title serves as an apt conclusion for the novel: each person, both Flora and now Maud, must seek her own truth; and each role, personal and theatrical (but can they be distinguished if all the world’s a stage?), also holds its own truth, the combination of which leads beyond the confinement of a single role, out of Winnie’s sand pile, and towards the constellation of luminous points, like so many flowers (‘flora’) and angels (‘anges’) that constitute (‘font’) one’s identity.21 And, at the end of the novel, we finally find ourselves, perhaps, in a position to complete the epigraph that preceded the opening pages: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one [woman] in [her] time plays many parts…

Chapter Ten

‘My Land(scape) is Winter’

In 1964, at the very outset of the Quiet Revolution, the already well-known folksinger Gilles Vigneault composed a song, Mon pays, often described as an ‘anthem’ or ‘hymne national,’ although erroneously so according to its author.1 The song was, nonetheless, banned from the air by Radio Canada during the eruptions of violence in October of 1970.2 The famous first verse and refrain, ‘Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver’ (My land is not a land, it is winter) seems to equate (‘c’est’) nation (‘mon pays’) with nature (‘l’hiver’), in its harshest yet most distinctively Canadian form, just as the North has come to identify Canada geographically.3 Indeed, the bright, intricate, and innovative snowscapes of painters like Suzor-Coté, Cullen, and Gagnon brought new dimensions and a sense of ‘Canadianness’ to the experiments with light inaugurated by the French Impressionists (chapter five). On the other hand, winter also spells danger for Pierre Cadorai (chapter eight), dementia for Menaud (chapter six), and death for François Paradis (chapter six). Conversely, the very harshness of the season and the increased vastness of space – emptied and homogenized by defoliated trees, barren fields, and a blanket of snow – invariably bring into focus a cultural place, usually the homestead or the hearth, and along with it a sense of reflection and community, as in this passage from Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine: ‘La maison devint le centre du monde, et en vérité la seule parcelle du monde où l’on pût vivre, et plus que jamais le grand poêle de fonte fut le centre de la maison.’ (98; The house became the centre of the world, and in truth the only parcel of the world where one could live, and more than ever the large cast-iron stove was the centre of the house.) In winterscapes, both verbal and visual, the cultural place, often absorbed into the beautiful vistas of spring, autumn, or summer and

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thus overlooked, is centred, aggrandized, and highlighted, while the snow-blown space is compressed and condensed around it. In this final chapter, we explore, in addition to Vigneault’s song, a short story Le chandail by Roch Carrier and a collection of novellas Les aurores montréales by Monique Proulx – three of Quebec’s most popular contemporary writers – in tandem with winterscapes by established painters like Mabel May and Albert Henry Robinson, in addition to those of three of the most successful artists recently working in the Charlevoix region: Bruno Côté, Christian Bergeron, and Raynald Leclerc. Gilles Vigneault: Mon pays Gilles Vigneault’s song Mon pays is composed of six stanzas; four stanzas consist of four alexandrines (twelve-syllable verses) each, which encase two longer stanzas of nine octosyllabic verses each. The fourverse opening stanza functions as a refrain, to be repeated three more times with significant variations: Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver Mon jardin, ce n’est pas un jardin, c’est la plaine Mon chemin, ce n’est pas un chemin, c’est la neige Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver4 [My land is not a land, it is winter / My garden is not a garden, it is the plain / My path is not a path, it is snow / My land is not a land, it is winter]

Not only is national identity (‘mon pays’) identified with nature (‘l’hiver’), but nature threatens to obliterate culture in the form of the cultivated garden, which provides sustenance and beauty, and the pathway, which guarantees human contact and commerce. As a result, paradoxically, Vigneault’s country can be said to lack true identity (‘Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays’) or to have a muddled sense of it, as Norell and Johnson contend: ‘Lorsque Gilles Vigneault chante “Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver,” le glissement entre territoire et climat résume un stratagème fréquent dans le traitement romanesque de l’identité québécoise ... ce glissement met en évidence les difficultés à saisir l’essentiel de l’expérience québécoise.’ (195; When Gilles Vigneault sings ‘My land is not a land, it is winter,’ the shift between territory and climate represents a strategy that is frequent in the treatment of Quebec’s identity in the novel … this shift points to the difficulty of grasping the essence of the Quebecois experience.)

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In the second stanza, composed of nine verses, even the notion of ceremony, usually the province of culture, is appropriated by winter: ‘Dans la blanche cérémonie / Où la neige au vent se marie’ (In the white ceremony / Where snow and wind are wed). It is within this wintry landscape, however, that Vigneault’s father constructed his home: ‘Dans ce pays de poudrerie / Mon père a fait bâtir maison’ (In this land of powder / My father had his home built). Whether we approach this verse literally and specifically, as a question of Vigneault’s personal family and dwelling, or figuratively and broadly, as a symbol of his national heritage, it is clear that the landscape now contains a cultural component – the home – which can stand up to nature and to which the poet pledges allegiance: ‘Et je m’en vais être fidèle / A sa manière, à son modèle’ (I go my way faithful / To its manner, to its model). The home then serves not as a simple retreat but as a rallying point for human contact and community: ‘La chambre d’amis sera telle / Qu’on viendra des autres saisons / Pour se bâtir à côté d’elle.’ (The guest room will be such / That in other seasons someone will come / To build beside it.) The entire second stanza resounds with echoes of French-Canadian cultural heritage, from La terre paternelle and Maria Chapdelaine (‘Mon père a fait bâtir maison’) to the colonies founded in Charles Guérin and Jean Rivard (‘se bâtir à côté d’elle’), to mention but a few examples that figure into this book. To build a home in the wilderness is to construct a personal place that reflects national values, such as resistance, persistence, and community. The third stanza is a highly significant variant of the first one in which the refrain itself, the melodic song, is undone by the winter wind (‘Mon refrain, ce n’est pas un refrain, c’est rafale’; My refrain is not a refrain, it’s a gust of wind) and the warm home is repossessed by the cold (‘Ma maison, ce n’est pas ma maison, c’est froidure’; My home is not a home, it’s the cold), clear setbacks for culture in the face of nature. The nine verses of the fourth stanza not only identify the reasons for the earlier demise of culture, but re-establish if not the supremacy of culture then at least its equal standing with nature as a component of Quebec’s identity: De ce grand pays solitaire Je crie avant que de me taire À tous les hommes de la terre Ma maison, c’est votre maison [From this vast solitary land / I cry out before keeping quiet / To all men on earth / My home is your home]

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In these opening verses, the poet identifies his country’s problem as one of isolation (‘solitaire’)5 and expresses his determination (‘je crie avant de me taire’) to combat it by reaching out beyond his own culture to contact humanity in a global sense (‘tous les hommes de la terre’) in order to offer that most characteristic of French-Canadian qualities: hospitality (‘Ma maison, c’est votre maison’). Entre ses quatre murs de glace Je mets mon temps et mon espace A préparer le feu, la place Pour les humains de l’horizon Et les humains sont de ma race [Within its four walls of ice / I put my time and my space / Into preparing the fire, the place / For humanity on the horizon / And all humans are of my race]

It is within the cultural place of the home (‘ses quatre murs’) that the poet does not abolish but recuperates time and space (‘Je mets mon temps et mon espace’) and repels the winter’s cold (‘glace’) through human warmth (‘le feu’). In comparing this poem with Émile Nelligan’s equally famous ‘Soir d’hiver’ (Winter evening), Donald Smith astutely notes that ‘la différence, bien sûr, c’est que Vigneault arrive à mettre le feu, à faire fondre la glace … à affronter l’hiver, à le dépasser’ (63; the difference, of course, is that Vigneault manages to light the fire, to melt the ice … to confront winter, to get beyond it). It is this step, beyond the limits both of nature and of culture past, that enables Vigneault to attain what Fernand Dumont calls a ‘second culture,’ as appropriate to these times of globalization as Nelligan’s poem was to his own era of isolation and consolidation. Seen initially as negative, then as national, identity finally assumes its highest form for Vigneault as an international phenomenon.6 For the FrenchCanadian people to survive and thrive in modern times, it must not only be tolerant of other nations and races, but also expand the very notions of nation and race: ‘Les humains sont de ma race.’7 Ultimately, Vigneault sees identity as multifaceted, multicultural, and even multiracial, preparing or perhaps inaugurating current views like that expressed by Louis Balthazar: ‘Le Québec est bel et bien une société pluraliste, multiethnique, laïque et ouverte sur le monde.’ (35; Quebec is well and truly a society that is pluralist, multiethnic, laic, and open to the world.)

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The penultimate stanza repeats the first, but its message of nature’s dominance over national identity (‘mon pays, c’est l’hiver’) is reversed by the final stanza: Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’envers D’un pays qui n’était ni pays ni patrie Ma chanson, ce n’est pas une chanson, c’est ma vie C’est pour toi que je veux posséder mes hivers [My land is not a land, it’s the flip side / Of a land that was neither country nor fatherland / My song is not a song, it’s my life / It’s for you that I long to possess my winters]

Despite the seemingly negative beginning (‘Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays’), by proclaiming his land to be the opposite (‘l’envers’) of a land that was neither a country nor a fatherland (‘patrie’), Vigneault implies that it is now or can soon be a true land, a modern land, one that reaches beyond its own culture and race to embrace those of humanity. And, by declaring his song to be more than a song (‘ma chanson ce n’est pas une chanson’), but his very life (‘c’est ma vie’) and his very reason for resisting and ultimately controlling winter (‘C’est pour toi que je veux posséder mes hivers’), Vigneault identifies his song as the humanistic means of preserving that humanitarian identity. For Vigneault, ‘la chanson, c’est un miroir’ (the song is a mirror), but a mirror that reflects that which was previously and otherwise invisible: ‘La poésie étant plus vaste que tout, étant ce je ne sais quoi d’insaisissable, s’incarne, en sa forme la plus pure dans le poème écrit. Ou mieux dans la musique. La chanson est une forme possible de cette incarnation’ (in Gagné, Propos, 34–5; Poetry, being more vast than anything, being that elusive something, assumes its purest form in the written poem. Or better yet in music. The song is a possible form of this incarnation). This incarnation is intimately linked to personal and national identity, based partly on the past – ‘La chanson est une identification. Nous sommes les porteparole de nos racines’ (35; The song is an identification. We are the spokesmen for our roots) – but especially as it informs the present and forms the future: ‘La chanson est un moyen vraiment moderne d’expression … Elle correspond à la civilisation de la sensation vers laquelle nous nous dirigeons.’ (34; The song is a truly modern form of expression … It corresponds to a civilizing of sensation towards which we are heading.) Identity is not only foraged from the past, it is, especially, forged from the present to shape the future; a ‘land’ is not just

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inherited and inhabited, it is construed and constructed, as Vigneault states in a parallel song: ‘J’ai un pays à creuser à construire’ (I have a land to dig out, to construct).8 And, for Vigneault, it is not only for his song that he persists but also it is through his song, the ultimate cultural place constructed within the vastness and sometime harshness of French-Canadian space.9 The Winterscape Tradition Popularized by Cornelius Krieghoff, the winterscape heightens the ever-present contrast between nature, uniformly blanketed in white snow, and culture, usually in the form of settlements, as we have witnessed in works ranging from Suzor-Coté’s Après-midi d’avril, Cullen’s Près des Éboulements, and Morrice’s Maison de ferme québécoise (chapter five) to the illustrations by Suzor-Coté, Gagnon, and Lemieux for the opening scene of Maria Chapdelaine (chapter six). In all cases, except perhaps for that of Lemieux,10 the cultural component, be it homestead or church, has also been enhanced by the contrast, as is the case with the winterscapes of other important French-Canadian painters. Mabel May, for example, often considered a precursor of modernity,11 painted her famous Flocons. Fenêtre de l’atelier in 1921 (figure 10.1). The studio window, a metaphor for the artist’s vision and the canvas itself (as suggested by what appears to be the reflection of an easel), allows May to juxtapose outer winter and inner warmth, much as in Gabrielle Roy’s ‘loi du Nord’ in La montagne secrète (chapter eight): ‘l’immensité au-dehors, au-dedans l’exiguïté’ (150; Immensity outside, compactness within). The falling snowflakes turn to rain in contact with the window pane in the foreground, which keeps them at bay, just as the snow-covered roofs of the houses grouped together in the middle ground protect their homes from the rigours of winter weather.12 In the far ground, set against the white wintry sky to the east, the domed building of the Congregation of Notre Dame looms at the centre of Montreal’s horizon, a reminder of the collective gathering of the FrenchCanadian people and the importance of religion in their culture.13 For Charles Hill, ‘décorative par l’agencement des toits, du dôme de l’église, des branches et de la neige qui tombe, cette peinture rappelle le style d’Albert Robinson, mais avec un traitement moins épuré et plus explicite en surface’ (Le Groupe, 334; decorative by the arrangement of the rooftops, the church dome, the branches and the falling snow, this painting is reminiscent of Albert Robinson’s style, but less

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10.1 (Henrietta) Mabel May, Flocons. Fenêtre de l’atelier, 1921. Huile sur toile, 56,1 x 69,2 cm. Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, 1959.1220, don du Dr et de Mme Max Stern. Photo: MBAM, Brian Merrett. © Dean May / Snowflakes. Studio window, 1921. Oil on canvas, 56.1 x 69.2 cm. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1959.1220, gift of Dr and Mrs Max Stern. Photo: MBAM, Brian Merrett. © and courtesy of Dean May.

purified and more detailed in surface treatment). Indeed, it is to Robinson, another example of ‘modernity,’14 that we now turn. Albert Henry Robinson’s Vue de Baie-Saint-Paul en hiver, circa 1923 (figure 10.2), sets the Charlevoix village against the snow-covered Laurentian hills. With the spectator perched on a bridge in the middle of the winding Rivière du Bras, a mere tributary of the wilder Rivière du Gouffre, the

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10.2 Albert Henry Robinson, Vue de Baie-Saint-Paul en hiver, vers 1923. Huile sur toile, 68,8 x 84,1 cm. Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, 1927.454, don de Mme W.L. Davis à la mémoire de son époux. Photo: MBAM, Christine Guest / Winter, Baie-Saint-Paul, circa 1923. Oil on canvas, 68.8 x 84.1 cm. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1927.454, gift of Mrs W.L. Davis in memory of her husband. Photo: MMFA, Christine Guest.

river seems tamed and toned down by the winding flood walls, which give the village of Baie-Saint-Paul the air of a fortress girded against the rigours of winter. The graceful arabesque of the otherwise dismal wall creates a diagonal entry into the picture space, then stabilizes its composition by its horizontal line, bisected at various points by the vertical thrust of the symmetrical – that is, planted – trees to the left and the

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telegraph poles (signs of communication) to the right. In the centre of the scene, a sleigh bearing logs or lumber, probably for the Baie-SaintPaul Lumber Company, one of the few industries in the village at the time (see Tremblay, 68), passes in front of the row of multicoloured houses set squarely along the horizontal line. Colours are subdued in hue but high in luminosity, as Walter Klinkhoff notes of Robinson’s work in general: ‘His vision of colour is most distinguished and subtle. Maurice Cullen remarked upon the difficulty of painting in low tone but high in key. We see in these canvases how well Mr. Robinson has solved this problem. Here the colours are muted, but how joyously they sing’ (5). Robinson’s use of brown and black lines to reinforce his forms lends his style a ‘cloisonné’ (set off) effect, reminiscent of the Pont-Aven painters15 and which, like the analogous, interlocking curves of the hills in black, alternating with bands of white snow, are a strong component of the structural solidity of the painting and culture itself, which like the village, resists the threatening winter. Carrier: Le chandail Alternately titled Une abominable feuille d’érable sur la glace (An Abominable Maple Leaf on Ice), Le chandail de hockey (The Hockey Sweater), or simply Le chandail, this famous short story was written by Roch Carrier in 1970 in response to a request by Radio Canada (in the same year, ironically, that Vigneault’s Mon pays was banned from its airwaves). Carrier recounts the circumstances in an interview with Tamara Tarasoff: ‘J’ai écrit Le chandail de hockey en 1970. Et, rappelez-vous, ’70, c’était le moment où, au Québec, il y avait une montée nationaliste. Le Canada ne comprenait pas ce qui se passait. Et la grande question était: “Qu’est-ce que le Québec veut?” Et Radio Canada m’avait demandé de répondre à la question.’ (I wrote The Hockey Sweater in 1970. And, remember 1970 was a time when there was rising nationalism in Quebec. Canada didn’t understand what was happening. And the big question was: ‘What does Quebec want?’ And Radio Canada had asked me to respond to the question.) Unhappy with an initial essay on the question, Carrier then composed the story, which has known enduring success. Published in volume form in 1979 and, the following year, made into a National Film Board of Canada animated short, illustrated by Sheldon Cohen and narrated by Carrier himself, the tale has become such a classic that an excerpt from it now figures in French and in English on the back of the Canadian five-dollar bill.

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Narrated in the retrospective first person, the story begins with a lamentation on the omnipresence of winter – ‘Les hivers de mon enfance étaient des saisons longues, longues’ (2; The winters of my youth were long seasons, very long) – followed immediately by an evocation of the three places from which one resisted winter’s ardour: ‘Nous vivions en trois lieux: l’école, l’église, et la patinoire.’ (2; We lived in three places: the school, the church, and the rink.) The passage from the singular ‘mon’ to the plural ‘nous’ suggests the solidarity of a group of young boys for whom, of course, the most important of the three cultural centres was the hockey rink – ‘mais la vraie vie était sur la patinoire’ (2; but real life was on the rink) – an isolated retreat from school, church, and parents alike, where one forges one’s own identity. Indeed, in the same interview with Tarasoff, Carrier reminisces: ‘à quel moment est-ce que j’ai vraiment senti quelle était mon identité? … j’ai réfléchi et j’ai pensé que ça m’était arrivé la première fois que j’avais chaussé les patins’ (at what moment did I truly find my identity … I reflected and thought that it had happened to me the first time I put on skates). In a later interview for an educational CD-ROM (Mydlarski et al.) Carrier notes of his story’s appeal: ‘Je crois que ça touche à l’identité.’ (I think it has to do with identity.) Identity, for Carrier, is both a personal and a collective phenomenon, achieved through identification, not only with the group, but with the greatest of all Canadian hockey players: Maurice Richard. This identification is cemented, as suggested by the story’s title, by the hockey sweater: ‘Tous, nous portions le même costume que lui, ce costume rouge, blanc, bleu des Canadiens de Montréal, la meilleure équipe de hockey au monde.’ (4; We all wore the same uniform as his, the red, white, blue uniform of the Montreal Canadiens, the best hockey team in the world.) The sweater enables the boys to transcend even the momentary differences that arise between two opposing teams – ‘Nous étions dix joueurs qui portions, avec le même brûlant enthousiasme, l’uniforme des Canadiens de Montréal. Tous nous arborions au dos le très célèbre numéro 9.’ (4; We were ten players who wore, with the same burning desire, the uniform of the Montreal Canadiens. On our backs, we all sported the famous number 9.) The hockey rink is thus the ultimate place of harmony and identity, a northern paradise preserving pre-adult unity, embodied physically in the identical sweaters and linguistically in the collective pronoun ‘nous’ coupled with the imperfect past tense, a misnomer given the permanence of the ‘perfect’ state it reflects.

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Yet, as adults, the narrator and readers realize that paradise is inevitably lost, and such is the case in the story’s fourth paragraph, in which a dramatic change is introduced when the boy’s sweater becomes too small and worn (6). Such a normal occurrence has a ready solution, but his mother, too proud to use the village store, prefers the more sophisticated (and no doubt less expensive) means of mail-order purchase through the Eaton’s catalogue, which she undertakes in French, not understanding the English forms. When the package arrives, the boy is devastated to discover ‘un chandail bleu et blanc, avec la feuille d’érable au devant, le chandail des Maple Leafs de Toronto’ (10; a blue and white sweater, with a maple leaf on the front, the sweater of the Toronto Maple Leafs), a sign, it would seem, that the shipping clerk in turn does not understand French. Despite the boy’s despair and resistance, his mother convinces him to keep the sweater, which he then wears to the rink. He is immediately surrounded by his gaping former comrades, isolated on the bench, relegated to the fourth line, which never sees action, and when he finally jumps onto the ice to replace an injured player, gets whistled for an infraction. So frustrated by his sense of injustice that he breaks his hockey stick, he is then sent off to church by a young vicar hovering around the rink and told to ask for forgiveness, not only for his anger but for his excessive pride in wearing a sweater different from those of his comrades. The story ends with the exiled and excluded boy’s prayer for moths to devour the Maple Leafs sweater, at which point, in the film, the image of Maurice Richard descends from the heavens to shake his hand in solace and solidarity, the mythe (myth) being more effective than the mites (moths). At first glance the story might seem to be one of individuation – achieving personal identity through separation, albeit reluctant, from the stifling peer group and its primary symbol, the jersey. In this sense, the mother’s lesson – ‘c’est pas ce qu’on met sur le dos qui compte, c’est ce qu’on se met dans la tête’ (12; it’s not what you put on your back that counts, it’s what you put in your head) – would seem to ring true. It is, however, the older narrator’s nostalgic and enthusiastic embracing of the boy’s dilemma that undercuts and undoes such an interpretation and, instead, promotes identity less as an individual than a national phenomenon. The sweater has become a symbol of national pride and heritage (the letter H, for habitant, interlaced with the C for Canadiens and set against the blue, white, and red of the French tricolour flag), not to mention resistance and even domination over the English-speaking majority: ‘De plus, l’équipe de Toronto se faisait terrasser régulièrement

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par les triomphants Canadiens.’ (Moreover, the Toronto team was regularly laid low by the triumphant Canadiens.)16 The mother has simply failed to understand the symbolic value of the sweater just as the Eaton establishment fails to understand French, and the young priest fails to understand the boy’s anger, mistaking his shame for pride. For pride here (like identity and power) is a national, not an individual, matter, as Carrier explains in his interview with Tarasoff: ‘Et j’ai l’impression que le hockey, c’était un monde à part où on avait quelque pouvoir. Et on avait le pouvoir par Maurice Richard. On avait le pouvoir par les Canadiens. Et les Américains pouvaient venir ... Toronto pouvait venir, les Canadiens français, on n’avait pas peur parce que Maurice Richard était là: il pouvait marquer.’ (And I had the impression that hockey was a world apart where we had some power. And we got our power from Maurice Richard. We got our power from the Canadiens. And the Americans could come ... Toronto could come, the French Canadians had no fear because Maurice Richard was there: he could score.) In his interview on the educational CD-ROM, Carrier again links hockey to national tradition and goes so far as to see in the hockey stick itself a vestige of the axe used by the French-Canadian pioneers and ‘colonizers’ of the land: ‘Et ensuite, il y a la glorification de nos ancêtres, qui étaient défricheurs, des hommes qui n’avaient peur de rien, des hommes qui ne craignaient ni les ours ni les érables à abattre. Alors, on a ces gens-là sur glace avec leur bâton qui reproduit vraiment le geste très souvent du bûcheron. Donc, c’est toute l’expérience canadienne qui est dans le jeu du hockey.’ (And then there’s the glorification of our ancestors, who were landclearers, men who feared nothing, men who feared neither bears nor maples to fell. So, we have these guys here on the ice, with their hockey sticks which very often really replicate the logger’s motion. Thus, the whole Canadian experience is in the game of hockey.) The main themes of the story thus seem relatively clear and highly typical: national pride and identity through myth-building (an assertive not passive one at that); and change, in the familiar French-Canadian form of paradise lost. But the values upon which national pride and identity are founded and the causes of the young protagonist’s fall from grace, two intertwined issues, are somewhat more clouded. Identity would appear to be unicultural and isolationist, even reactionary and negative, based as it is on a series of refusals: the mother’s refusal to learn English or even to muddle her way through the forms; the shipping clerk’s refusal to learn French or to seek help in deciphering the mother’s letter; the boy’s refusal to wear the jersey; the mother’s

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refusal to listen to her son, even with tears in his eyes, or to understand the symbolism behind the sweater; his friends’ refusal to recognize their former comrade, to look beyond what he is wearing (it is here that the mother’s misapplied maxim works) or to accept ‘difference’; the vicar’s refusal to understand the boy’s frustration and shame, followed by edict and punishment. In short, despite the active aggressive nature of the Maurice Richard myth, the values would seem to reflect those of the conservative Duplessis era in which they are set rather than those of the liberal Quiet Revolution era in which the story was written.17 This series of refusals and rejections, dramatized by conflicts and often highlighted by dialogue (in the negative form of argument and edict), lead the reader to the work’s supplemental themes: misunderstanding and rejection, which, if left to stand, would produce a negative view of the notion of change and the inevitable process of aging, which the humorous, nostalgic tone of the story belies. Indeed, it is not the problems that lead us to the ideology embedded in a work, but the potential solutions, which represent the values of the community as translated by the writer and which invariably lead us to a deeper level of meaning. As Carrier states, unequivocally and unforgettably, in ‘Ceci n’est pas un conte’ (This is not a story): Un conte, qu’il soit folklorique ou écrit de la veille, qu’il soit comique, fantastique ou poétique, loin d’être un véhicule d’évasion est plutôt un instrument qui donne un regard plus profond. Le conte est une forme de perspicace conscience. C’est un éclair de grâce pendant lequel le lecteur et l’auteur ont le pouvoir de traverser les murs, d’apercevoir en même temps l’envers et l’endroit, hier et demain. Le conte a conscience de tous les possibles. [85; A short story, whether folklore or written yesterday, whether comic, fanciful, or poetic, far from a vehicle for escape, is, rather, an instrument that produces a deeper perception. The short story is a form of astute consciousness. It’s a state of grace during which the reader and author have the power to pass through walls, to perceive at once the front and back sides, yesterday and tomorrow. The short story raises all possibilities to mind.]

In the early short story, like the fairy tale, such possibilities or solutions were often made explicit through the narrator’s direct commentary, sometimes accompanied by a ‘moral’ tacked on the end, itself often misleading depending on the subversive or repressed nature of the implicit message. In the modern short story, of which Carrier is an

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acknowledged master, the message is rarely explicit but must be teased out by the vigilant reader (with encouragement by the writer, such as that provided by Carrier’s comment above) through extrapolation in the form of problem solving. And, by approaching the problems dramatized in Le chandail in terms of solutions rather than causes, an entirely different set of values emerges. The initial misunderstanding is not due to shopping by catalogue (a common practice in rural Canada since 1880 and continued today by online shopping), but to linguistic deficiency: the mother knows no English, the shipping clerk no French, although each lives in a bilingual country. Indeed, Montreal is a bilingual city and the Canadiens a bilingual team. The NHL is bilingual and international. Even Richard’s well-known nickname, the Rocket, is English, and he himself learned English diligently, as necessity dictated.18 The solution for Carrier would appear to be in the bilingualism championed by Trudeau among others at the very time of the story’s writing.19 A second misunderstanding arises from the mother’s misreading of her son’s values and the symbolism of the sweater. The solution is clearly one of déchiffrement (decoding, learning to read signs), which is part of the act of communication, the first and foremost part of which is expression. Carrier is, after all, by trade and by calling, not a hockey player, but a reader and a writer: that is, a communicator.20 A third example of misunderstanding stems from the boy’s friends’ failure to see him as a person rather than just the representative of a foreign (English-speaking) culture, which leads to his exclusion not only from the hockey rink, but also from his peer group and thus to an ‘identity crisis.’ In a sense, the French-speaking community perpetuates the very schema of exclusion that it accuses the English-speaking community of foisting upon it. When pride (even national) begets prejudice it can become destructive and self-destructive.21 For Carrier, the solution seems to be an openness and appreciation of the individual as a human being not for the culture (or symbol of it) that he wears: that is, at least tolerance, at most multiculturalism.22 The fourth misunderstanding involves the priest’s misreading of the motives – both for the boy’s anger and for his wearing the sweater – then his authoritarian edict and punishment of the boy: a pattern that resembles the mother’s behaviour and points to a ‘generation gap.’ The implied solution is a detachment or liberation, not only from the family (the past) but also from the church (religion), the mainstays of the conservatism that reigned in Quebec prior to the Quiet Revolution.23

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Put succinctly, the Maurice Richard era, in which the story is set, is constructive in moving the question of national identity from one of persistence to that of resistance, combat, even triumph; the post Quiet Revolution era, in which the story is written, is all the more constructive in pointing out the problems of any society, however resistant, combative, and triumphant, that is too self-centred and self-contained, while implying possible solutions in tune with current practices. By this route we arrive at an entirely different potential reading of the story’s values and thus of the notion of national identity than that of the previous, and admittedly more overt, message. But that is the nature of irony – its profound, hidden meaning is the opposite of its stated one – and Carrier is an ultimate ironist, whose style is based on exaggeration and contradiction and whose message is often of a double nature.24 Carrier’s irony is not, to be sure, the bitter type of his first master, Voltaire,25 but a gentle form of irony that doesn’t seek to obliterate its targets but to appreciate and even accommodate them. In this sense, we might speak, as does Dumont, of a cultural ‘doubling,’ where the idols and icons of a first culture, a conservative one, are complemented by the ideals of a second culture, based on a more liberal vision that trumps but does not trammel the first. The two visions are clearly different and perhaps even contradictory, but this is, after all, at the very core of Quebec identity since the Conquest (see Létourneau, 12–13), an identity Carrier is able to probe and promote through the act of writing. During his interview for the educational CD-ROM (Mydlarski et al.), Carrier expands on the significance of the hockey rink: ‘Mais la culture de hockey au Canada, dans le pays tout entier, c’est une expérience fondamentale. C’est d’abord l’expérience de l’hiver et on a dompté l’hiver, hein? Parce que voilà, nous avons la glace là et la glace est devenue domptée. Nous contrôlons la danse. La glace, nous la polissons, elle est sous notre contrôle. C’est l’hiver maîtrisé. On met des lignes, on met des cercles, on maîtrise, on enferme dans une clôture, on maîtrise l’hiver.’ (But the hockey culture in Canada, in the whole country, is a fundamental experience. First of all, it’s the experience of winter, and we subdued winter, eh? Because there you have it, there was the ice, and the ice was now subdued. We control the dance. The ice is now polished, under our control. Winter is mastered. We add lines, we add circles, we control it, we fence it in, we master winter.) The same sense of dominating the very winter setting one embraces might also describe Carrier’s motivation to write, echoing Vigneault’s praise of the song as a means of ‘posséder mes hivers’ (possessing my winters) and Proulx’s

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assessment of her coming to writing that ‘je sentais que je pouvais manier les choses’ (Santoro, McPherson, and Bascom, 626; I felt I could control things). And, the image of orthogonal lines and geometric circles superimposed on the surface of the ice, as well as the statements by the three writers, might well provide a parallel with and perspective from which to approach the contemporary winterscape in painting, where winter is ‘fenced in’ by the frame of the canvas. The Contemporary Winterscape Current landscape painting, often centred in the Charlevoix region of Gagnon, Lemieux, and Richard, also reflects a contrast between nature and culture and, indeed, a more complex, even contradictory combination of cultures, in that the subject matter remains traditional and pointed towards the past, while the vision and technique incorporate new ways of seeing and rendering the landscape, often in a geometric or architectural manner. The combination of tradition and innovation amply characterizes the work of Bruno Côté, as exemplified in his pochade (colour sketch) Rang Cap-aux-Corbeaux, circa 2000 (plate 14).26 Winter appears to dominate the canvas in massive bands of white and blue that run from the snowcovered north shore in the near ground, to the icy waters of the Saint Lawrence River, then to the western end of the île aux Coudres across from Baie-Saint-Paul, and finally to the south shoreline, shrouded in clouds and covered by heavy sky in the far ground. In the middle ground, however, the clustered houses exude a warmth embodied in the radiant pink tints that link them together as a community and that are also imparted to the crest of the snow-covered fence in the foreground, the vertical stand of trees to the right, and even, in traces, to the snow, river, and sky. As Roxane Babinska puts it in her description of the pochade, ‘L’air est une masse, la lumière pénètre difficilement la matière. Elle arrive comme un glacier dans le ciel et dans ce silence les demeures sont des pensées roses.’ (62; The air is a mass; light, penetrating matter with great difficulty, arrives like a glacier in the sky; and in this silence the dwellings are like pink pansies or thoughts.) For ‘pensées’ the translator chooses ‘pansies’ in the English text of the book (62), but the word ‘thoughts’ also works to emphasize the human contrast with and dominance over winter. Despite the small percentage of canvas space it occupies,27 the warmer colour, by its intensity and dispersion, by its uniqueness and appeal, is able to withstand and overcome

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the perceptual and emotional weight of winter. It is, however, as with Vigneault, less through the home itself than by the means of its representation that culture comes to dominate nature, in Côté’s case not only by the innovative use of colour, but also by the highly visible and very dynamic brushwork.28 Applied in patches of strokes, alternating in direction and streaked by the bristles of the brush, the swathes of paint not only suggest the undulations of the landscape but also capture the viewer’s attention, standing out on the surface of the canvas, where they reveal the hand of the artist and trigger the imagination of the viewer; as Babinska notes, ‘l’œil moderne aime l’épaisseur de la peinture, les sillons de la brosse, le rebours des tracés, le mélange au carrefour des couleurs. Cette peinture en volumes subtils accroche incessamment la lumière naturelle et sollicite l’imaginaire tactile du spectateur.’ (90; the modern eye likes the thickness of the paint, the furrows of the brush, the nap of the lines, the mixing point of the colours. This painting in subtle volumes incessantly attracts the natural light and engages the spectator’s tactile imagination.) This is not to imply, however, that the prominence of colour and brushwork in any way diminishes the painting’s composition. Indeed, in the work of Côté, whom Babinska aptly calls an ‘architecte’ (30), the structure of the painting often emerges subtly and progressively from the arrangement of the colours. Here, for example, the nearly submerged fence posts in the lower left corner lead the eye into the painting and up the fence-line, becoming increasingly pink as it moves towards the massive pink barn at the right. The barn itself is turned towards a line of pink houses running diagonally left, where it meets the houses on the shore, which in turn form a counter-diagonal line heading towards a stand of trees at far right, slanting upward towards the far shore such that it brings the river to a point and lends it a triangular shape, matching that of the island. Indeed, the entire painting can be seen as a series of interlocking wedges that imposes a quasigeometrical order on the irregular shapes of the natural landforms, an order rendered all the more visible by the uniformity of the winter snows, which smother the details that would have hindered perception of the underlying architecture. As Guy Boulizon puts it, in a generalization that could apply to Côté as well as Bergeron and Leclerc, ‘Pour un peintre, l’hiver et la neige sont d’étonnantes occasions d’explorer l’organisation spatiale et d’exprimer son langage plastique ... Et si l’artiste utilise une même sorte de touche, dans tout le tableau, l’impression de bidimensionnalité et de planéité peut être encore renforcée.’ (166; For a

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painter, winter and snow provide exceptional opportunities for exploring spatial organization and expressing its plastic language ... And if the artist uses the same sort of brushwork in the entire painting the impression of two-dimensionality and planeity can be emphasized.)29 Christian Bergeron’s Village en hiver from 2010 (plate 15) also displays an architectural structuring of space, although more explicitly so than in Côté’s pochade. The base image, a village nestled into the hills bordering a river, resembles not only that of Côté’s setting and those of Bergeron’s more traditional paintings, but corresponds to the very archetype of the Quebec landscape, with a cultural place enclosed within a natural space. Here, warm bands of yellow and orange alternate with cold bands of blue and white, rising diagonally from lower left to upper right – intersected by two counter-diagonal lines that serve to balance the composition – until they meet the deep blue hills and mountains, also ascending diagonally, which form a bay for the village. Set at the same angle and homogenized by similar shapes, sizes, tones, and colours, the houses follow that same diagonal slope until it reaches the church steeple, which rises above them, much as the peak looms over the mountains. The upward thrust of the steeple is matched not only by that of the houses, but also by the shafts extending downward from them, like traces of the houses’ geometrical shells creating vertical bars that intersect with the diagonal bands to form a grid of line and colour. Indeed, it is precisely these vertical lines, striating the bottom three-quarters of the frontal plane of the canvas, which break with traditional representation and cause the viewer to question their visual meaning. In one sense, these trailing parallel lines may replicate the artist’s memory of the buildings’ forms as his eye scans the scene from top to bottom, a sort of retinal after-image imposed onto the landscape. In this way, Bergeron simply renders visible the lines of force emanating from the predominant shape and position of the houses. In another sense, however, the lateral surfaces of the house walls are also projected onto the landscape, generating a sense of three-dimensional space and volume that enable the painter to see the land forms, like the buildings, geometrically and from slightly different vantage points, thereby freeing the painter to experiment with the variations in colour and light that lie on each side of the ‘crests’ created on the surface of the canvas. In both cases, the technique implies a dynamic sense of perception and painting, which involves seeing the same scene (houses and land) at different moments in time and from different vantage points in space.

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Bergeron’s own designation of his style as ‘prismatic’ provides further clues to the geometrical patterning and vivid colouring,30 while accounting for the aura of ‘transparency’ on the surface, as if seen through a prism, an effect that Bergeron conveys masterfully, despite working solely with a palette knife. Taking the houses, seen at an angle and thus from their corners, as a point of departure, we can read the lines as the front edges of a series of triangular prisms and the sides as their facets, running away from the lines at the same 45-degree angle as the house walls. In effect, the overall illusion is that of a village perceived through a prism or as a prismatic field with some ten parallel lines intersecting the irregular shoreline, which functions as a sort of break-off point, above which, unlike below, ‘nature’ prevails over ‘culture.’31 The light, coming from the left, reflects brilliantly off the side of each prism, its white matching that of the snow, and refracts into colours as it passes through the prism to its right facet. Blue, the slowest colour in the spectrum, thus lingers low, adjacent to the white light, while the more vivid hues dance above it, conveying the second sense of ‘prismatic,’ which is ‘colourful’ even ‘kaleidoscopic,’ an apt description of the painting. Thus, in addition to the visual ambiguities of time and perspective mentioned earlier, there is a further tension in the painting between the shallow ‘prismatic’ space of the frontal plane and the deep ‘perspectival’ space of the middle and far grounds, along with a vibratory effect produced by the juxtaposition of the complementary colours blue and orange, the former appearing to recede, the latter to advance – all of which adds to the painting’s dynamism, despite the seemingly static qualities of both the village and the prism through which it is made to appear. The ultimate space is, of course, not that of the village, nor even that of the visual field, but that of the canvas itself, and the ultimate subject is that of the painter’s freedom, not only from the traditional rules of perspective and optics, but especially from those of traditional painting that govern the representation of light and colour, line and perspective. This painting is a reconfiguration of reality and an aesthetic statement that reflects the contemporary directions of landscape art in Quebec, based as it is on a traditional setting yet experimenting with new ways of representing it. It is precisely the freedom of (and from) perspective, along with an even more pronounced application of pigment than in his earlier works (chapter nine), that characterize the latest phase in Raynald Leclerc’s painting, as in Vue du ciel (Québec) from 2010 (plate 16). Here the title

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tells the tale, not only because it promotes the act of viewing (‘Vue’) to a position of prominence over the subject (‘Québec’), a mere parenthesis, but also and especially because that viewpoint is an imagined one (‘du ciel’), freed from the conventions of a limited point in space and a specific moment in time that govern traditional perspective, thereby allowing the imagination to ‘soar’ over the city. The subject, the city, nonetheless persists through recognizable buildings, whose position Leclerc confirmed with aerial photographs and which he uses as reference points to anchor the composition: the Price building, the only ‘skyscraper’ within the walls of the old city, flanked by the silver steeples of the seminary to the left and the Holy Trinity Cathedral to the right, and matched on the far right by the similarly golden dome of the post office, thus constituting a vertical counterpoint of laic and clerical. In the distance, on a jetty the customs houses protrude into the Saint Lawrence River, whose icy white waters border the top of the canvas, just as the snow-covered parc de l’Esplanade closes the bottom. The relationship of the buildings then allows us to determine the vantage point from which they are ‘seen’: hovering over the row of adjoining multicoloured houses on the rue d’Auteuil, which lies just inside the western walls of the old city. Moreover, this initial liberating step of freeing the viewpoint inaugurates a parade of others. First, the loosening of line frees the shapes of the houses and allows Leclerc to emphasize the interplay of their colours, such as the run of reds up the middle of the canvas. At the same time the buildings, no longer mere facades masking those that lie behind them, acquire a certain volume and assume a certain position in relation to each other and to the entire grid that defines the overall configuration of the city. Complementing the vertical buildings, the nearly horizontal band of the row of houses on the rue d’Auteuil is repeated in the rectangular roof and side of the Ursuline convent just behind it, while the orthogonal lines they initiate are intersected by the diagonal originating at the post office, reinforced by the cathedral, and continued by the rue Sainte-Anne, which slices by the Price building towards the lower left corner, thereby, from this angle of vision, dividing the old city into two triangles, the upper one terminating with the seminary steeple. Freed also are the very hallmarks of Leclerc’s art: texture from matter, light from time. Perceived (conceived) from a relatively removed distance in space, the building materials no longer dictate the texture, as with the effect of stone and mortar obtained in Leclerc’s Porte Saint-Louis (figure 9.1); seen (envisaged) at an indeterminate moment in time, light

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is no longer bound to hour of day and angle of vision as in Rue SainteAnne (plate 13). To be sure, Leclerc retains and relates a general sense of tactile differences between stone and metal, between city and river, just as he conveys the overall luminous quality of a winter’s day. However, texture and light (not to mention colour and form) seem as determined by their neighbours on the canvas as by their counterparts in reality, as if, in painting one form, the colour, light, and texture generate the next one and harmonize them together on the surface of the painting. Thus, unlike the effect of daylight perceived at a given moment, which tends to produce zones of light and shadow, often modulated, here Leclerc is able to use the snow-covered roofs, reflections off the buildings, and sheets of ice to create patches of light and dark that lend the canvas a mosaic-like appearance. As Leclerc puts it, ‘Je regarde maintenant la lumière qui bouge sur les choses et non les choses elles-mêmes … la plus pure qui soit, celle qui fait effraction entre deux objets, dans les interstices de la matière.’ (in Filion, L’île, 10; I now look at light moving on things and not at the things themselves … the purest it can be, light that breaks between two objects, into the interstices of matter.) In short, still the mainstay of Leclerc’s technique, the use of impasto with a palette knife, liberated from the texture and luminosity of any particular object, becomes free to explore its own means and expressive potential. The impasto and the strokes applying it are thus more prominent over the entire surface of the canvas, as we witness especially in the icy river, producing a remarkable visual density in the image. Coupled with the flattening of space devolving from the elevated viewpoint, the texture thus emphasizes the surface of the canvas, the vision of the artist, and the technique of the artistry, as much as the subject portrayed. This reconceptualizing of the painting by no means implies, however, the disappearance or minimizing of the subject, the cityscape, but rather its reconfiguration as a totality. In his earlier paintings, the depiction of the city is limited to fragmentary views: the narrow, winding rue Saint-Anne, the towering walls of the porte Saint-Louis, which block the view into the old city; the superimposed facades of various building parts seen from the parc Montmorency (figure 9.2). Conscious of this fragmentation of the city, in a recent book showcasing his artistic evolution, Leclerc experiments with broader views across the Saint Lawrence from the île d’Orléans and from the south shore.32 In these cases, a general view is achieved, but at the expense of particularity: the few recognizable monuments serve as reference points but don’t visually resurrect the rest of the city. In effect, what

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Leclerc has achieved in Vue du ciel (Québec) is a synthesis of the general and the particular, the distant and the near, the outer and the inner, which enables him to lay before us the entire (old) city of Quebec, organized geometrically into a single image. In a sense, with this final image we have come full cycle back to the first one in this book – the Gastaldi engraving of Hochelaga – similarly seen from an imaginary bird’s-eye perspective that allows the painter to seize in a single image the entire ‘walled’ Amerindian city, depicted geometrically. Needless to say, Leclerc’s cityscape exhibits the visual diversity and density that distinguish both modern art and the modern city, traits that also characterize Monique Proulx’s Les aurores montréales. Les aurores montréales Monique Proulx’s Les aurores montréales is a collection of twenty-seven stories published together as a single volume in 1996. Although the pieces are short, ranging in length from a single page to twenty pages, they are generally broad enough in scope and time frame to warrant their designation by the author as novellas, rather than short stories. Although most are set in Montreal, the variety of topics, places, themes, characters, social classes, ethnic groups, and narrators matches the diversity of the urban setting, creating what Dominique Fisher terms a ‘mosaïque transculturelle’ (311; transcultural mosaic). Despite the variety, the overall work, and thus the city itself, is structured rigorously, even geometrically, by six stories, placed at regular intervals (in terms of numbers of pages, not numbers of stories), each involving the colour white in its title, and each printed, title and text, in italics to distinguish it from its immediate neighbours. As Anne de Vaucher notes, ‘Cette architecture si volontaire a une triple valence: la charpente du receuil est donc chevillée par ces récits en couleur, comme l’est la société de Montréal par toutes les ethnies qui la composent, comme l’est la littérature québécoise par l’apport des écrivains d’origine étrangère.’ (117; This wilful architecture has triple meaning: the frame of the collection is held together by these tales in colour, as is Montreal society by all the ethnic groups that compose it, as is Quebecois literature by the contribution of writers of foreign origin.)33 These are the stories we’ll highlight here in the order of their occurence. In the first story, Gris et blanc, a young boy, recently immigrated with his mother to Montreal from Costa Rica, writes to his dog reluctantly left back home describing his adopted city. The narrational naivety

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recalls that of Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and leads to a similar relativizing of cultures and satirizing of big-city life, where there’s ‘beaucoup d’asphalte et de maisons grises’ (7; a lot of pavement and grey houses [9]) and ‘une grande école grise et une cour en asphalte grise’ (8; it’s a big grey school with a grey pavement yard [10]), thereby revealing the sterile drabness and homogeneity connoted by one of the two colours in the title. The meaning of the other colour is not revealed until the final paragraph,when the narrator sees snow for the first time: ‘La beauté blanche qui tombait à plein ciel, absolument blanche partout où c’était gris.’ (9; The white beauty falling from the sky, absolutely white where before it was grey [11].) In effect, the colour white represents not only purety, but also the freedom of undifferentiated space (previously missing in the confined place of the city),34 as well as the salvatory triumph of nature over culture, a complete reversal of Vigneault’s Mon pays. In Jaune et blanc, dedicated to the Shanghai-born Quebecois writer Ying Chen, the visual use of colour in the physical world is expanded and abstracted to represent two races. The narrator (a young Chinese woman, herself a recent immigrant from Shanghai) writes to her grandmother, describing a terrifying but revealing experience in her new culture: a visit to a modern Western department store. In this case the previous comfort of places, sites of memory – ‘les lieux sont des miroirs poreux qui gardent les traces de tout ce que nous sommes’ (53; places are porous mirrors that hold traces of everything we are [50]) – is altered by the vast, undifferentiated space of the department store, where inumerable, indeterminate objects ‘se multiplient et se dérobent et se fondent à l’infini en un seul objet monstrueux’ (54; multiply and hide and melt together into one single enormous object [51]). Since places, however horrifying, are nonetheless ‘mirrors,’ the narrator sees the store as a reflection of the city: ‘Montréal m’est apparu comme une énigme indéchiffrable dont les clés et les codes pour survivre m’échapperaient à jamais.’ (54; Montreal seemed to me an indecipherable enigma for which I would never find the keys and the codes for survival [51].) Well, not quite ‘never,’ since the narrator is determined to understand and thus adapt: ‘Je parle mieux français chaque jour, mais chaque jour je sens leur méfiance. Je reste une ombre en retrait. Ils sont les seuls à pouvoir se libérer de leur méfiance, les seuls à pouvoir conquérir le sol qui leur appartient déjà.’ (56; With each day I speak French better, but each day I feel their mistrust. I remain a weightless shadow in the background. They are the only ones who

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can free themselves from their own mistrust, the only ones who can conquer the ground that belongs to them already [53].) This extension of her own cultural alienation to that of French Canadians continues the satire and especially the principle of relativity and the revelation it brings to both cultures. The narrator comes to appreciate and articulate a newfound freedom (57), not that inherent in her adopted culture but that gained by the juxtaposition of the two cultures, which leads finally to a rediscovery or reconfiguration of ‘place’: ‘J’ai trouvé mon lieu, grandmère, celui au centre de moi qui donne la solidité pour avancer, j’ai trouvé mon milieu.’ (57; I have found my place, Grandmother, the place inside that gives me the strength to go forward, I have found my centre [54].) The notion that finding ones own ‘place’ and the freedom it entails does not involve a return to the past but an advancement based on selfassurance, and a new, broadened cultural experience is a lesson plainly aimed at the French-Canadian people, not just the Chinese immigrant. Rose et blanc, dedicated to the Italian-born francophone playwright Marco Micone, takes the form of yet another letter, written by a young French-Canadian woman of Italian descent to her Italian-language teacher, Ugo Lagorio. A budding writer, she has fallen in love with him through his works, which express her own thoughts, and through what she sees as their common ethnic situation, interpreted thus: ‘Je suis née ici, je ne suis pas une immigrante, je veux occuper le territoire. Depuis que je sais que ce coin de terre est francophone, je refuse de m’extraire de la majorité dominante, je refuse de stagner dans les rangs des exclus.’ (96; I was born here. I’m not an immigrant, I want to make this land mine. Since I’ve realized this place is French-speaking, I refuse to cut myself off from the majority, I refuse to stagnate in the ranks of the excluded [85].) Yet despite her desire be ‘French-Canadian,’ she is equally determined to remain ‘Italian,’ which explains her attraction to Lagorio: ‘Ce qui nous attend, toi et moi, c’est une perspective peut-être exaltante, après tout, celle de ne jamais fondre dans l’homogénéité qui endort.’ (97; What awaits us, both of us, is a fate that could be exhilarating: never melting into the stultifying homogeneity [85].) In short, she is determined to experience the contradiction of being at once inside and outside of the dominant culture, at once unified and diverse, homogeneous and heterogeneous, which is fast becoming a central issue in this collection of tales. Here, however, the focus is on ethnicity not race, and the colours of the title apply accordingly: white connotes the nordic temperament – ‘les femmes nées ici sont polaires et acides comme les pommes d’hiver’ (97; the women born here are as cold and bitter as

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winter apples [86]); pink suggests the passion she feels in her origines: ‘du feu se répand dans mes entrailles, du feu gicle en moi et illumine ce que je touche, frontières misères tensions bancs de neige fondent à distance et se muent en lacs sacrés sur lesquels j’avance en dansant.’ (98; fire squirts out of me and illuminates whatever I touch, borders sorrows tensions snowbanks melt from afar and become sacred lakes on which I dance [86].) The fire she proposes to share with Ugo appears to imply, at the same time, a broader rekindling of the embers of her adopted ‘polar’ environment (‘frontières misères tension bancs de neige’). Noir et blanc, dedicated to Dany Laferrière, the popular FrenchCanadian writer born in Haiti, is clearly about race, but in its problematic relation to ethnicity and culture. As the narrator, a Haitian immigrant to Montreal, addresses himself apostrophically to Malcolm X, the ethnic differences between American and Haitian blacks, as well as the cultural differences between Chicago and Montreal, become readily apparent. The narrator condemns Malcolm X’s racism against whites (expressed in Spike Lee’s film), which has fuelled that of the narrator’s wife and children, citing examples of mistreatment on the part of all races as a question of universal human (mis)behaviour: ‘l’homme est un loup pour l’homme, qu’il soit noir, jaune, ou vert martien’ (141; men prey on other men, whether they’re black, yellow or Martian green [125]). This story also creates a sense of relativism, as in the case of his daughter’s school: ‘le fait que les Blancs de son collège ne s’assoient jamais aux mêmes tables que les Haïtiens à la caféteria – remarque bien, frère, que le contraire est tout aussi vrai.’ (142; the whites never sit at the same tables as the Haitians – but notice, brother, the opposite is equally true [125].) The narrator vigorously defends Montreal – ‘Est-ce que je ne serais pas le premier informé s’il y avait du racisme à Montréal?’ (140; If there were racism in Montreal, wouldn’t I be the first to know? [124]) – citing the adulation accorded to Dany Laferrière: ‘un roi à Montréal’ (143). As he misquotes (and misunderstands) the title of a Laferrière novel and discounts several examples of ‘mild’ racism, however, his credibility is weakened, and his naivety again produces a satire of even this most tolerant of cities, lending an overall effect of ambivalence to the story. Again the white snow becomes a symbol of nature’s purity, contrasting with cultural imperfections, but not as a phenomenon that eliminates all but Nordic experience: ‘Mais quand la neige est blanche, Montréal a l’air d’une jeune mariée. Quand la neige est vraiment blanche, c’est là que c’est facile, c’est là qu’on peut marcher en imaginant que c’est du sable.’ (144; But when the snow is white, Montreal

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seems like a young bride. When the snow is truly white, that’s when it’s easy, that’s when I can walk in it pretending that it’s sand [127].) Rouge et blanc again foregrounds issues of race, culture, and relativity, but with a decided reversal of roles. Narrated by a young Amerindian (Mohawk) woman in the form of a prayer to her god, the mother of humanity (193), the story begins with a pledge not to again attempt suicide and a promise not to return to the reservation but to remain in Montreal, a place of more authentic origin: ‘Cette vieille Hochelaga où vivaient mes ancêtres.’ (194; This old Hochelaga, where my ancestors lived [169].) The reason for her decision to ‘infiltrate’ the conquering culture is not to undermine or overthrow it but, through relativity, to understand it and thus herself: ‘Je veux nous voir comme ils nous voient’ (194; I want to see us the way they see us [169]). What she already grasps is not the differences but the parallels between the two cultural situations – ‘nos voies parallèles’ (194; our parallel paths [169]) – too often ignored by the dominant culture: ‘Lorsqu’ils pleurent l’injustice qui leur échoit depuis cent ans et oublient la nôtre qui dure depuis des siècles.’ (195; When they weep about the injustices they’ve suffered these last hundred years yet forgotten ours, which have lasted for centuries [169].) Indeed, it is the white ‘immigrant’ for whom imprisonment by the delusion of racial and cultural superiority leads to a lack of identity (‘âme’): ‘Je veux les contempler, prisonniers du mirage de leurs corps et de leurs biens périssables, en train de planer au-dessus du vide qui remplace leur âme.’ (195; I want to contemplate them, prisoners of the mirage of their bodies and their worldly goods, gliding above the emptiness that has replaced their souls [170].) Armed with natural forces (‘forces naturelles’), the narrator resolves to adapt to the times and thus survive: ‘Le temps est venu d’affronter le temps luimême, de nous adapter à la vie qui a changé de visage … il faut apprendre à y enfouir de nouvelles racines ou accepter de disparaître.’ (195–6; The time has come to confront time itself, to adapt to a life whose face has changed … we must put down new roots or accept death [170].) This principle of adaptation to change is, according to Proulx, a lesson that must also be learned by the dominant culture, the French-Canadian, if it is to survive and thrive in modern times, benefitting by the very resource the stories are bringing to the fore: cultural diversity. The final story, titled with the single colour Blanc, takes the form of a monologue addressed by a young French-Canadian woman, a wouldbe writer, to a dying anglophone man whom she had contrived to accompany in death in order to better understand life and thus to be able

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to write truthfully (233). Since returning to Montreal she has lost her sense of identity – ‘telle une chienne désorientée … je ne trouve plus ma jeunesse machinale dans les miroirs qui me dévisagent’ (231; a disoriented dog … now when I look in the miror I can no longer find my youth [201]) – which she blames on Montreal having lost its own youth: (‘Montréal a changé … depuis le référendum peut-être … il faut apprendre à devenir quelqu’un tout seul, sans soutien patriotique … je cherche le Montréal d’avant dont la confortable exiguïté me déprimait alors tant.’ (231–3; Montreal has changed … maybe since the outcome of the referendum … you have to learn to become someone all alone, with no patriotic support … looking for the old Montreal whose comfortable narrowness I used to find so depressing [201–2].) Thus, like the dying man losing life, she is on a desperate quest (236) for meaning, which, since no longer preordained, takes the form of freedom for both beings, expressed less through the colour white than through light – ‘irradier’ (234; shine [204]), ‘incandescence’ (235; aflame [204]), ‘brilliez … éclat’ (237; shone ... brilliance [206]). Finally light (‘lumière’) leads to lightness (‘légèrté’) – ‘une flamme de légèrté … c’est la légèrté qui nous manque le plus dans cette vie de plomb.’ (238; a flame of your own lightness … lightness is what we lack most in this leaden life [207–8].) This is the lightness of being, not the heaviness of having been; the lightness of self-definition, not that of identity defined. In the final paragraph, as the snow falls outside and the dying man flees this place towards another ‘space,’35 the narrator anticipates a parallel experience: ‘Essence volatile affranchie de l’obscurité, je me sentirai un instant moi aussi comme un espace vierge, John, je serai comme vous une page blanche sur laquelle rien n’est encore écrite.’ (239; Volatile essence set free from the darkness, for a moment I will feel like virgin space, John, like you, I will be a white page on which nothing has been written [208].) Thus the final connotation of white is that of the blank page, on which, Proulx suggests, the narrator, like the nation, must learn to accept not an identity already written but the challenge of writing it, of creating it. It is hardly surprising that a writer would express self-definition, the construction of identity, through the metaphor of writing, and indeed it may be less a metaphor than the ultimate manifestation of the process; that is, the arts may well be the primary means of forging the path towards defining identity. Certainly, the most prevalent common characteristic of all the characters and narrators in the stories we have looked at, despite ethnic diversity, is the determination to learn and to use the French language.36 Several of them are also writers, as are the main

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characters in many of the other tales, including ‘Les aurores montréales,’ which lends the collection its title and ultimate meaning. A play on ‘les aurores boréales,’ the northern lights, the substitution of ‘montréales’ underscores the city’s distinctive northern identity, linked to snow throughout the collection, as is Quebec throughout this chapter. And, although the six stories we have looked at lack the geographic specificity of the remaining ones, they are like the boulevards running through and linking the network of ethnic neighbourhoods featured in the other tales, most of which are located, to be sure east of the boulevard Saint-Laurent, which separates the English community from the French.37 Due also, however, to the ethnic variety of the protagonists, there is ample, even equal reference to places around the globe – from Haiti, to Greece, to Shanghai – which, according to the geographer Luc Bureau, have a significance equal to those in the immediate setting (176–7). Befitting the notion of diversity and multiculturalism underlying the collection, Proulx depicts Montreal less as a closed inner circle than as a hub radiating out towards its international circumferance. The meaning of ‘aurores’ is revealed in the novella whose title contains it,38 as the main character and centre of vision, Laurel, a would-be writer, removes his notebook from his backpack: ‘La lumière bouge sur le papier vierge et allume, s’il la regarde longtemps sans ciller, des ombres colorées qui ressemblent à des aurores boréales. Tout à coup, le titre de son livre lui apparaît, fulgurant sur la page blanche … Son livre s’appellera Les Aurores montréales, parce que Montréal est une ville qui n’arrête pas de changer … une ville qui additionne tellement de nouveaux visages que l’on perd toujours celui que l’on croyait enfin connaître.’ (163–4; The light moves on the virgin paper and, if he looks at it a long time without blinking, fires coloured shadows that look like aurora borealis. Suddenly the title of his book appears to him, flashing on the white page … his book will be called Aurora Montrealis, because … Montreal is a city that never stops changing … a city that adds so many new faces that we always lose the one we finally thought we knew [143].) The narrator regrets, even resents, these changes, which usually involve faces of different colours, until he is ‘welcomed’ to Montreal by a Greek rollerblader he had always seen as his archenemy, which forces him to abandon his book, the very book, of course that Monique Proulx writes in defence of diversity, in praise of varied colours, and where ‘aurores’ also radiates with its connotation of ‘dawns,’ of new beginnings. As de Vaucher summarizes it, ‘par le biais

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de la fiction elle représente la transformation en acte de l’identité québécoise grâce/ou à cause de ces nouveaux venus, de toute race et de toute couleur’ (113; from the angle of fiction she represents the process of transformation of Quebecois identity thanks/due to these newcomers, of all races and all colours).39 Why, then, foreground the colour ‘white,’ and what is its relationship to ‘les aurores boréales,’ renowned rather for its spectacular displays of varied colours? White is the most ambivalent of all colours; in fact, in terms of pigment, it is defined as the absence of colour, one way, to be sure, to look at race, in terms of universality, but in a homogeneous way that denies diversity. On the other hand, seen in terms of light, as implied by ‘aurores,’ white is the presence of all colours, heterogeneity united, and this is the way Monique Proulx appears to represent culture,40 much as Aimé Césaire sees it: ‘Une des caractéristiques de la culture, c’est le style, c’est-à-dire cette marque propre à un peuple et à une époque … il est bien vrai que la règle ici est de l’hétérogénéité. Mais attention … il s’agit d’une hétéogénéité vécue intérieurement comme homogénéité.’ (201–2; One of the characteristics of culture is its style, a distinguishing mark that is peculiar to a people or period … heterogeneity is certainly the rule here. But beware … it’s a matter of heterogeneity experienced from within as homogeneity.)41 Just what constitutes the French-Canadian ‘style,’ its identity, is, of course, the question. All of the writers in this chapter can be said to reconfigure traditional notions linked to identity: winter, hockey, the city, ethnicity; all of the painters can be termed ‘traditional’ in terms of subject matter: that is, the positioning and enhancing of a cultural place against the background of wintry space. At the same time, all of the painters, especially Côté, Bergeron, and Leclerc, embody a dynamic way of seeing rendered by innovative techniques that matches the spirit of Vigneault, Carrier, and Proulx and points towards a new ‘vision’ of Quebec, as articulated by Guy Robert in the introduction to his book on Quebec painting since 1940: ‘le Québec ne sera pas considéré ici comme une île, une forteresse close, mais bien plutôt comme un lieu ouvert, dynamique, assumant ses antinomies et son stress quotidien, se donnant stratégiquement un sens dialectique, et de façon particulièrement remarquable au fil de ses oeuvres plastiques.’ (197; Quebec will not be considered here as an island, an enclosed fortress, but rather as a place that is open, dynamic, assuming its contradictions and its daily stress, strategically acquiring a dialectical meaning, and in a way that is particularly noticeable in the development of its visual arts.)

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The wintry snow, far from eradicating and erasing culture as it threatened to do at the outset of Mon pays, becomes a metaphor for the blank page, the white canvas, or even the icy rink, upon which culture writes or paints itself. The forms that it takes and the messages they entail inform the evolving issue of national identity, to which we now (re)turn in the conclusion of this book.

Conclusion

From Imagery to Identity

During the course of our exploration of landscape in the literature and painting of Quebec, a set of constants has emerged from the imagery, not only forming ‘icons’ but also suggesting themes, ideals, and values, all of which, taken together, can perhaps contribute to an understanding of the elusive issue of national identity. By icons (in the broadest sense of ‘representative images’), I mean objects (like the tree), places (like the garden), or spaces (like the wilderness), which in turn, by repetition and prominence, generate themes (like paradise lost), then ideals (like paradise regained), the attainment of which implies certain solutions or values (like retrenchment or, conversely, reinvention), often contradictory in nature yet entertained conjointly to form the Quebecois identity. Rather than list or tabulate all the recurrent images encountered in various texts and paintings, I will simply reiterate the most significant or ambivalent ones briefly, relying again on our two main operating categories, nature and culture.1 On the one hand lie images related to nature, which, on the North American continent, takes the form of ‘la grande nature,’ the wilderness, encompassing a cluster of overlapping phenomena like the forest, the mountain, and the river, along with the weather, the seasons, and the North. The vast undifferentiated space of the wilderness is generally seen as forbidding yet beautiful and alluring, dangerous yet regenerative and revelatory. Of nature’s various components the forest is perhaps the most monolithic with its threatening encroachment (Maria Chapdelaine), challenging the défricheur to do ‘battle’ (Jean Rivard) in the name of agriculture and culture (Rivard inherits his battle metaphor from a book on Napoleon). The central fixture/figure of

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the tree, however, is considerably more polyvalent, representing the family in Charles Guérin, variety in Croquis laurentiens, solitude in La montagne secrète, origins in Le premier jardin, and creativity in Reflets de la nuit, as well as a similar array of themes in the paintings of Légaré, Brymner, Leduc, Richard, and Borduas. The more distant mountains carry additional connotations, like freedom (Menaud), the quest for identity (La montagne), and creative energy (Riopelle), while the everdangerous river (Menaud, La montagne) further suggests the passage of time (Angéline, Suzor-Coté) and, more surprisingly, a certain hybridity owing to the mixture of waters as rivers mingle or encounter the sea (Charles Guérin, Le premier jardin, Ode au Saint-Laurent). The change of seasons sets the rhythm for ‘rural’ novels like Jean Rivard and Maria Chapdelaine, while further conveying the changing emotions of protagonists like Charles Guérin and Angéline de Montbrun. Even more than the beauty of autumn, winter proves especially fascinating and prevalent in French-Canadian works, serving as a source for exploring light for the Canadian Impressionists, as a constant danger in Maria Chapdelaine, Menaud, maître-draveur, and La montagne secrète, but also as a rallying point for strategies of renewal, as in Mon pays, Le chandail, Les aurores montréales, and the works of current Charlevoix painters like Côté, Bergeron, and Leclerc. The notions of change, quest, and regeneration inherent in the passage of the seasons apply especially to the mysterious North, as elusive for the French Canadian (Jean Rivard, La terre, La montagne, Mon pays) as is the frontier West for the American. In general, nature and natural phenomena were traditionally represented as givens until the mid-twentieth century, when a radical reconfiguration initiated by Borduas and the automatists led artists to interiorize and reconceive phenomena like the tree (Borduas, Gauvreau), the river (Lapointe), and the mountain (Riopelle), effecting a liberation of natural forces and a renewal of culture itself, including verbal and visual expression. At the other pole stand images related to culture, which can involve places that are constructed, like the family homestead in La terre paternelle, Charles Guérin, and Mon pays; controlled, like the garden in Jean Rivard, Angéline de Montbrun, and Le premier jardin; or reconfigured, like that very garden, interiorized, as in the works of Pellan and Giguère. Among prominent visual icons, fields, fences, and farms evoke the struggle of agriculture against nature, the steeple reminds the viewer not only of one’s religion but also of one’s village, while the cross and the rock serve as sites of possession and memory in several early short

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stories and in the paintings of Légaré and Gagnon. The city, stigmatized in La terre paternelle and Jean Rivard and ridiculed in La chasse-galerie and Angéline de Montbrun, is rehabilitated in Charles Guérin and Krieghoff’s Québec vu de la pointe de Lévy and reconfigured in contemporary works like Le premier jardin, Les aurores montréales, and Leclerc’s Vue du ciel (Québec). These and other inherited cultural icons invariably populate the written or painted landscape, which simultaneously depicts the omnipresent force of nature, both forbidding and alluring. For the French Canadian artist, if not the French ancestor or the Ontarian counterpart (Group of Seven), both beauty and identity are constituted by the coexistence and dynamic interplay of culture with nature. In addition to these two operational themes of nature and culture, identified and imposed from the outset but confirmed by analyses of individual works and reference to numerous other critics who also wield the two terms in tandem,2 two other major themes have emerged from this study, both suggesting problems that apply at once to the individual protagonist and to the French-Canadian nation: the notion of paradise lost and that of the quest for an ideal not (yet) found. The thematic threads suggesting a lost paradise run from the earliest, L’Iroquoise (where the Père Mesnard’s idyllic colony is destroyed and he, rejected by his Algonquin ‘flock,’ is forced to leave for Huron territory), to the most recent, Les aurores montréales (where protagonists, immigrant and native alike, are alienated from their previous countries and their present city) and is so prevalent as to be seized upon by Louis Hémon as he paints his newly adopted country in Maria Chapdelaine, where the mother constantly dreams of a ‘paradis perdu’ and Maria’s great love, François Paradis, is ‘perdu’ in a snowstorm and along with him the hope of an ideal life. The loss of a youthful paradise is, of course, a mainstay in Western literature and has a parallel importance and longevity in France, for example.3 In French-Canadian literature and painting, however, it assumes specific characteristics that make it national in nature: the loss of paradise often involves not just expulsion, but the loss of the father’s land (La terre, Charles Guérin) and even the father (Jean Rivard, Angéline, Le premier jardin); at the same time, the loss is often occasioned by other cultures: by physical force in the case of rival tribes (L’Iroquoise, Louise, Cadieux); by economic manipulation of the English-speaking foreigner (La terre, Charles Guérin); by symbol, as with the appearance of a Maple Leaf sweater (Le chandail); or by the threatening presence of ‘the other’ (Les aurores montréales). This combination of characteristics leads us consistently to read the loss of paradise as more than a simple coming

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of age, but rather as a parable for the loss of fatherland at the time of the Conquest, the loss of father figures in the wake of the failed patriots’ rebellions, or the threat of assimilation by English-speaking Canada and invasion by immigrants. The elusive ideal sought by numerous characters takes many forms, from material entities like the mountain (Menaud, La montagne), to places like the mysterious North (La terre, Maria, La montagne) and intangible notions like love (Maria), spirituality (Angéline), creativity (Lapointe, Borduas, Riopelle), and in works too numerous to mention, identity itself. The quest for an ideal is, if anything, an even more universal theme than that of paradise lost, but again takes on particular characteristics in its French-Canadian versions, translated, as we have seen, by the landscape. The common feeling of being ‘stranded’ or ‘abandoned’ (both by the father and by society) often prompts the protagonist to seek his or her individual identity, beyond that of the family or reigning cultural paradigm, and hence in another ‘space’: France for Pierre Guérin, Maurice Darville, Pierre Cadorai, the Canadian Impressionists, Borduas, and Riopelle; the city for Charles Guérin, Flora Fontanges, and the narrators of Proulx’s Les aurores; the new uncolonized cantons for Charles Guérin, Jean Rivard, and Samuel Chapdelaine; the North for Charles Rivard, François Paradis, Pierre Cadorai, and Gilles Vigneault. The inevitable ‘voyage’ that leads to ‘discovery’ takes the protagonist to another cultural experience in the first cases, and in the latter ones to the natural space of the North American wilderness – the river, the forest, and the mountain – where he or she, often imitating ancestral avatars like the voyageur and the coureur de bois, discovers the natural self and thereby rejuvenates the cultural self, an identitary coupling to which we return in short order. Both of these themes, paradise lost and an ideal pursued, imply the passage of time – the first pointing towards the past, the second towards the future – and thus bring considerable nuance to the oftrepeated phrase in Maria that nothing changes in Quebec (‘au pays de Québec rien ne change’).4 At the same time, to the degree that their backward and forward movements, respectively, are contradictory yet coexistent, they confirm Jocelyn Létourneau’s definition of identity, Gérard Namer’s description of commemoration, and Fernand Dumont’s notion of cultural doubling. Indeed, most remarkably, nearly every work examined, even those considered conservative, invokes an image or an insight that transcends culture in the concrete sense of icons and idols, termed ‘culture

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première’ by Dumont (Le lieu), and thus promotes the process of cultural doubling, leading to a reconfiguration of culture itself in terms of its deeper values or ‘culture seconde.’ Not only does every work of art, even the most common, remove us from everyday reality, thus creating a sense of distance, but nearly every one of the works we have encountered calls attention to this distance and doubling, thereby expanding its initial notion of culture to explore ideals and values, even suggest ‘solutions’ to the problems attached to the major themes raised by various images and icons. Thus, a principal feature of French-Canadian literature and painting (not so true, it seems to me, of their French ancestors) is the notion of a dramatic discovery, a revelation, often accompanied by ‘voices,’ which emanate from the individual consciousness but reflect the values of the community (Jean Rivard, Maria, Menaud, La montagne, Reflets de la nuit, Ode au Saint-Laurent). Furthermore, this revelatory and revolutionary process often involves an apprenticeship in deciphering signs, not only those of society, as is characteristic of nineteenth-century French fiction,5 but especially those of nature, whose vital lessons must be learned in this new and cryptic land. Dumont identifies both memory and great works of art as the principal stimuli for cultural preservation and reconfiguration, and certainly both are among the principal solutions brought forth explicitly in the works we have examined. That memory would be a major factor in determining cultural definition is hardly surprising for a nation whose very motto, spelled out on its license plate, is ‘je me souviens.’ Less obvious, perhaps, yet increasingly evident from our study of literature and painting, is the role of the landscape in triggering, anchoring, and guiding memory. Sites of memory figure prominently in works ranging from L’Iroquoise, with Mesnard’s cell, to Le premier jardin, where certain places are initially avoided, precisely because of the lethal memories they evoke, then confronted to complete Flora’s rehabilitation. Such sites are often complemented by the staging of past events in the present according to Namer’s description of the commemoration process, as we witness in paintings extending from those of Joseph Légaré to Raynald Leclerc, who evokes his own past apprenticeship through the historic sites of Quebec City. Garneau follows the routes of Cartier and Champlain up the Saint Lawrence River, complementing their descriptions with signs of modern progress and vision, while Angéline visits Garneau’s tomb, not far from the resting place of the heroes he has resurrected in his

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Histoire du Canada. Not only does memory play a major role in most works, its very mechanisms are laid bare in ‘memorable’ passages from Charles Guérin, Angéline de Montbrun, and La montagne secrète, and in all cases it is the landscape that serves to unlock, then stage, the workings of memory. Far from regressive, the return to the past enables the French Canadian, his or her values threatened by assimilation, to make contact with the values of the past and find, for example, in the courage, cunning, self-sacrifice, and sign-reading abilities of the Amerindian and the voyageur remedies for present woes and solutions for future growth. Ultimately, it is the text or painting itself that becomes a site of memory, ‘more faithful than the best memory,’ as the narrator of Papineau’s ‘Caroline’ puts it – but at the same time a ‘blank page’ or canvas on which to write the future, as in Proulx’s ‘Blanc’ – which leads us to a second source of cultural redefinition identified by Dumont and implicit in our study from the outset: the work of art. The extent to which various works of art point to their own cultural significance, as in the preceding quotation, is no doubt another defining characteristic of Quebec literature and painting. In many a written text, another written text is also present on a thematic level, not only in examples of intertextuality too numerous to mention, but in cases of intratextuality, where they create a nested effect of ‘mise en abyme’ (play within a play), as Mesnard’s manuscript, Cadieux’s ‘Complainte,’ Angéline’s diary, Flora’s theatrical roles, and Laurent’s notebook (Les aurores) bear witness. Similarly, a painting like La France apportant la foi aux Hurons also contains within it a painting that plays a cultural role parallel to that which contains it, while the window in Mabel May’s ‘Fenêtre de l’atelier’ mirrors the very frame of the painting that represents it, while reflecting the artist’s easel on which it was painted. At the same time, allusions to painting abound in literature, culminating with the appearance of the painter/protagonist Pierre Cadorai in La montagne secrète, while allusions to literature are present not only in the titles of certain paintings (Brymner’s Ils aimaient à lire) and in illustrations of various works by Légaré, Julien, Suzor-Coté, Gagnon, and Lemieux, but even, occasionally, by displaying texts, as in Suzor-Coté’s La mort de Cadieux. In both literature and painting, allusions to the ‘song’ seem to confirm Vigneault’s contention that it is the form most typical of and unique to Quebec, not only because it is not ‘colonized,’ but also perhaps because its performance is often collective. Finally, writing itself, its processes and effects, is discussed in Caroline, Angéline de Montbrun, Ode au Saint-Laurent, Mon pays, and Les aurores montréales,

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while contemporary painting makes visible use of the visual language of the paint and brushwork to highlight its own techniques and tactics. Writing and painting do not merely serve as records of the past, but as means of renewal and regeneration for artists like Laure Conan, Gabrielle Roy, Gatien Lapointe, Monique Proulx, Bruno Côté, Christian Bergeron, and Raynald Leclerc. In Angéline de Montbrun, for example, the character’s act of writing can be said to liberate her self, her author, their sex, and their nation from the stifling constraints of their ‘first culture’ with its ingrained and static traditions. In addition to the transformative effects of memory and art noted by Dumont, the works explored here themselves point to further factors for cultural regeneration, which can, again, be grouped into the main categories of analysis used in this book: exposure to nature and contact with other cultures. Although nature, with its set of correlative icons and themes, can be depicted as an enemy to be conquered, and dangerous at that, it is also seen, in numerous texts and paintings, as regenerative. In La terre paternelle, for example, by leaving the family farm to become a voyageur in the pays d’en haut (the North), Charles is able to free himself from the paternal yoke, strengthen his own sense of identity, then restore the lost family property. Maria Chapdelaine’s encounter with François Paradis, who brings with him the spell of the wilderness, instils in her a new ‘magic’ vision that extends beyond that of either parent. In the works of Borduas, the automatists, their descendants, and their admirers, the tree, the forest, the river, and the mountain inspire their creators with a new invigorated vision of culture. Moreover, the revelatory voices alluded to earlier nearly all have their roots in nature. In a dream set in an immense forest, Jean Rivard hears a voice that prompts him to pursue his conquest. While staring out the window at the forest, Maria hears voices, which, according to the narrator, speak clearer in the midst of the great North woods, and the first voice evokes the beauties of seasonal changes. In Menaud, maître-draveur, Le Lucon first hears the voice of freedom in the depths of the virgin forest, where ‘dreams still reside,’ while Marie’s view of the distant mountains from her hilltop vantage point evokes a similar discovery of freedom also accompanied by a voice. The trees and the forest speak to the poet Hurbur and the reader Corvelle in Gauvreau’s Reflets, while the poet listens to the river’s voice in Lapointe’s Ode au Saint-Laurent. Pierre’s dialogue with his secret mountain instils a solidarity with nature that leads to his discovery of his natural self, then to his solidarity with the universe and with others.

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If the French-Canadian nation becomes a ‘race that will not die’ (Maria, Menaud) it is in large part due to the contact with other races and cultures that is sustained throughout the texts and paintings we have encountered. Indeed, the early short story and the first paintings of Légaré and Krieghoff are dominated by Amerindian protagonists, who impart lessons not only of courage and freedom, but also of hybridity itself, essential to the revitalization of the French-Canadian nation in the wake of political failures and threats of assimilation. Garneau devotes a large portion of his history to the Amerindian nations, detailing their icons, customs, and values, many of which (the canoe, for example) have already been adopted by French Canadians. Pierre Guérin, Maurice Darville, and Pierre Cadorai undertake the customary voyage of initiation to France, as do painters like Suzor-Coté, Cullen, Morrice, Gagnon, Borduas, and Riopelle, whose lessons in French Impressionism, surrealism, and abstraction then enhance their own reinterpretation and reinvigoration of the Canadian landscape. Many other characters, notably Jean Rivard, Angéline de Montbrun, Pierre Cadorai, and Flora Fontanges, are exposed to a variety of other cultures through literary texts, which cause them to expand their view of the nation, the universe, and the cultural lenses through which they see. Immigrant writing and the mere presence of immigrant cultures enlarge and enrich the concept of national identity in Les aurores montréales. In short, as Réjean Beaudoin puts it, the modern novel undergoes and undertakes an ‘interrogation plurielle’ (Le roman, 76). This plurality and expansion in turn broaden the notion of national identity, which cannot be attained by simply inheriting the father’s ‘culture,’ his land, and values, but must be forged through confrontation with the past, art, nature, other cultures, and the shifting circumstances of history. It is at this point that we can perhaps summarize just what lessons have been discovered, what new values have emerged, and what traits of national identity have come into sharper focus from our study of the literature and painting of Quebec. The cogent statement of the political scientist Louis Balthazar – ‘Quebec is well and truly a society that is pluralist, multiethnic, laic, and open to the world’ (35) – is meant to apply to ‘modern Quebec’ (37), after the Quiet Revolution. In my view, however, it is important to stress that, in fact, the germs of these traits are already present in Quebec’s earliest works of art, which cause their readers and spectators to move beyond a limited and limiting concept of culture often attributed to Quebec and progress to a broader one, based on values more

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than customs. Indeed, to see Quebec as a closed, fixed, monolithic, and regressive society is to limit one’s perspective to geographic setting and historic necessity, mingled with a large dose of cultural misunderstanding or outright prejudice, and ignore the evidence of its literature and painting, where imagination has, from the outset, privileged openness, nomadism, hybridity, and progress. Among the many manifestations of this second culture that round out an understanding of national identity, beginning with Létourneau’s notion of contradiction and the yen for nomadism identified by Warwick and Morissonneau, our discussion has further highlighted, especially, a certain diversity and openness, along with a tendency towards self-determination and its artistic counterpart: self-representation. The very landscape of the North American continent promotes a certain perception of variety and diversity, anathema to the ‘utopian’ unity, simplicity, and symmetry of Cartier and Champlain, but embraced by French Canadians themselves, beginning with Garneau’s opening words in book two of his Histoire du Canada, arguably the most influential work we have examined: ‘Ces contrées si variées, si étendues, si riches en beautés naturelles, et qui portent, pour nous servir des termes d’un auteur célèbre, l’empreinte du grand et du sublime, étaient habitées par de nombreuses tribus nomades qui vivaient de chasse et de pêche.’ (195; These regions, which are so varied, so extensive, so rich in natural beauties, and which, to use the terms of a famous author, bear the imprint of grandeur and the sublime, were inhabited by numerous nomadic tribes, who lived by hunting and fishing.) Garneau’s emphasis on diversity, not only in nature but also in cultures, carries through nearly all of the texts and paintings we have explored. Moreover, this diversity reveals itself through a plurality of ‘voices’ ranging from the multiple narrators in L’Iroquoise and Les aurores montréales to the numerous roles, representing many languages and cultures, played by Flora in Le premier jardin. Flora’s identity must thus be seen as a composite of multiple, even contradictory factors, as is the ‘secret’ of Pierre’s multifaceted mountain, a mirror of its painter; in both cases the reader is invited to extrapolate from the personal to the national level. Similarly, the shifts in perspective and accompanying relativism that characterize landmarks of French-Canadian literature, like Charles Guérin and Angéline de Montbrun, often involve other cultures, including the Iroquois in Louise, the Algonquin in Cadieux, the Eskimo in La montagne secrète, and the Mohawk in Proulx’s ‘Rouge et blanc.’ This same mixture of cultures also applies to paintings as differ-

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ent as La France apportant la foi aux Hurons, Légaré’s Paysage au monument à Wolfe, which includes an Amerindian along with a British hero, and Brymner’s Ils aimaient à lire, whose title borrows a line from Shakespeare (whose works are also cited in La montagne secrète and Le premier jardin). From this cultural diversity to the outright multicultural perspectives of Vigneault, Carrier, and Proulx, it is not a radical revolution (quiet or not), but a natural progression that reflects a nearly constant openness of vision in Quebec’s great works (culture seconde), if not always in its prevailing institutions (culture première). Furthermore, far from fatalistic, as some might have it, the French Canadian is consistently depicted in great works as self-sufficient and self-determining. From Cadieux, the intrepid voyageur, to his successors, Charles Chauvin, Jean Rivard, Pierre Cadorai, and Jean-Paul Riopelle, the protagonist often sets out alone to find and ultimately forge his or her (Angéline and Flora also opt for solitude) identity. For the artist, self-determination is also a matter of self-representation, which is manifest in the visible style typical of Quebec painting and the open discussions of art coupled with allusions to other works in its literature, culminating with the dramatization of Pierre Cadorai’s struggle, struggle itself being another correlative of self-determination. Cut loose from friends (as is Pierre) from family (as are Charles Guérin, Jean Rivard, Angéline, and Flora), and from country (as are various narrators in Les aurores montréales), protagonists become ‘self-made’ and, in so doing, serve as models for the nation. From Samuel Chapdelaine’s ‘faire de la terre’ (make land) to Roland Giguère’s ‘paysage à refaire’ (landscape to redo) and Gilles Vigneault’s ‘pays à construire’ (land to construct) it is simply a matter of broadening the scope, and moreover, this correlation between personal and national identity is yet another constant of Quebec art. Indeed, the quest for identity invariably involves more than just the coherence of an individual’s trajectory; it ultimately entails the adherence to collective values: that is, the move from solitude to solidarity (Menaud, La montagne secrète, Refus global, Mon pays).6 In short, these many works present themselves not only as cultural products but as cultural projects, which stage the contradictory components that contribute to the complexity of French-Canadian identity, the question of which few nations have pursued more persistently. My main contention is that this arduous pursuit of identity is often staged within the landscape, where various sets of contrasting icons, those representing nature and those embodying culture(s), can be

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combined and juxtaposed in close proximity in the same works, verbal and visual, nature serving perhaps as a reminder of the ongoing struggle to preserve and renew culture. It is no doubt the notion of persistent struggle, raised to a mythological level in literature and painting, that comes closest to occupying the central position in the constellation of multiple, often contrasting points that constitute the French-Canadian identity. And is it not the notion of persistent struggle that also characterizes the promethean task of the artist, both writer and painter, to capture the vast space of human experience on the intimate place of the page or the canvas, while preserving the traces of that monumental effort through twisted syntax and typography or rapid, nervous brushwork? Anne Hébert responded to a similar question as follows: ‘Nothing is ever won for good. Everything must always be started over again. In living as well as in writing.’7 Struggle is, of course, universal in nature and thus a constant of world myth and literature, but it seems to me that it assumes a particular flavour in Quebec, not just in art, but in living or, rather, in the art of living. Many a foreigner, myself included, has been struck, as was Louis Hémon, by the good will and good humour of our adoptive country’s citizens: ‘une race pétrie d’invincible allégresse et que rien ne peut empêcher de rire’ (19; a race moulded of invincible elation, which nothing could keep from laughter). The Quebecois nation is, in short, not only ‘une race qui ne sait pas mourir’ (194; a race that will not die), but also, especially, ‘une race qui sait vivre’ (a race that knows how to live).

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Notes

Introduction 1. According to Pierre Nepveu, ‘Le paysage a toujours été un enjeu crucial pour les littératures d’Amérique.’ (Intérieurs, 167; The landscape has always been a crucial issue for the literatures of America.) Throughout this book, notes are used for exposition, not bibliographic information. References in the text refer directly to the bibliography via the author’s name. Crossreferences can best be located through the index. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2. As Luc Bureau concludes, in his list of five definitions of ‘nature,’ ‘Il y a la nature s’opposant à la culture, et qui désigne le champ des phénomènes ou des objets n’ayant pas été appropriés et apprivoisés par l’homme.’ (34; There is nature as opposed to culture, the former designating the field of phenomena or objects not appropriated and tamed by man.) 3. Of six definitions of ‘culture’ identified by Michel de Certeau, the one that corresponds best with my understanding is ‘l’acquis, en tant qu’il se distingue de l’inné. La culture est ici du côté de la création, de l’artifice, de l’opération, dans une dialectique qui l’oppose et la combine à la nature.’ (Culture, 190; something acquired, insofar as it is distinguished from something innate. In this sense, culture is on the side of creation, artifice, and operation, in a dialectic that opposes it to, yet combines it with, nature.) See also Césaire, 191–2. 4. At the time of his death, Dumont was considered one of the most important Quebecois thinkers and writers of the second half of the twentieth century (see G. Leblanc). Memory is also bound to identity, as Lisa Gasbarrone contends: ‘Memory and its official counterpart, history, are never far from the center of any discussion of ethnic or national identity,’ ‘Narrative,’ 31.

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5. Christian Morissonneau provides an interesting example in the concluding chapter of La terre promise, ‘La contradiction,’ 175–89, in which he points out that the powerful lure of the North is seen by some as a regressive return to the past and by others as a regenerative step towards the future. 6. ‘A lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material or nonmaterial in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time may become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community,’ Nora and Kritzman, xvii. The link between landscape and memory is reinforced by Simon Schama’s book of that title in which he also stresses the interrelationship of nature and culture – ‘Instead of assuming the mutually exclusive character of Western culture and nature, I want to suggest the strength of the links that have bound them together’ (14) – in order to defend nature from encroachment in modern industrialist societies, but he does not deal with Canada. 7. From the poet Louis Fréchette’s ‘La découverte du Mississipi’ or ‘Jolliet’ (1873). 8. For de Certeau, ‘place’ is also a fixed configuration (‘les éléments considérés sont les uns à côté des autres, chacun situé en un endroit “propre” et distinct qu’il définit’ [the elements being considered are beside each other, each located at its ‘own’ distinct site, which it defines]), while ‘space’ is dynamic if experienced as such (‘en somme, l’espace est un lieu pratiqué. Ainsi la rue géométriquement définie par un urbanisme est transformée en espace par des marcheurs’ [in short, space is a place in use. Thus a city street defined geometrically is transformed into space by walkers]), ‘Récits,’ 208. 9. See, for example, Dumont’s description of ‘deux fédérations opposées des symboles, des signes, des objets privilégiés où le monde prend sa forme et sa signification pour une communauté de conscience’ (62; two opposed federations of the priviledged symbols, signs, and objects that lend the world its shape and meaning for a given community). 10. For further discussion of the relationship between literature and painting, see Berg, Imagery, 15–29. 11. In Gagné, Propos, 37. 12. Warwick’s classic study, The Long Journey, translated by Jean Simard as L’appel du Nord, will be discussed in some detail in this book, especially in chapter six, as will Morissonneau, who argues that ‘plus profond qu’un thème littéraire, le Nord est un thème mythique inscrit dans une idéologie’ (La terre, 26; deeper than a literary theme, the North is a mythic theme inscribed within an ideology). Morissonneau goes on to liken the

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Canadian North to the American West, as examples of the ‘frontier’ in the English sense of ‘expanse,’ not the usual French sense of ‘border,’ 59, 106. 13. On the complex interrelationship of text and image in the illustrated book, see especially Silvie Bernier, Du texte, 19–63. 14. As Boulizon puts it ‘le paysage québécois est un lieu privilégié pour étudier le problème beaucoup plus vaste des rapports entre la Nature et l’Art, entre la Nature et la Culture’ (13; the Quebecois landscape is a privileged place to study the much broader problem of the relationships between Nature and Art, Nature and Culture). 15. Trépanier, ‘Le paysage,’ 11. For an excellent study setting pan-Canadian landscape art into its evolving social and aesthetic context, see McKay. Chapter 1. The French Heritage: From Utopia to Eden 1. Cartier did not ‘discover’ Canada; the coastline had been visited by Europeans for many years, even centuries; Cartier was, however, the first to open up the interior of the North American continent by his discovery of the Saint Lawrence waterway in 1535–6. See Lasserre; Trudel. 2. As overstated as Bureau’s assertions may seem, in a synthesis of the thirty papers on Renaissance landscape presented at an international colloquium in 1985, Demerson concludes that ‘il n’y a pas de nature en dehors d’une culture qui la fait exister; dans le paysage – et c’est ce qui est typique de la Renaissance – la nature n’existe que parce qu’une culture l’attend, sinon elle ne serait pas perçue.’ (328; there is no nature outside a culture that makes it exist; in the landscape – and this is typical of the Renaissance – nature exists only because a culture expects it to, if not, it wouldn’t be perceived.) Indeed, Carile titles his contribution ‘Nature et culture dans les premières descriptions de la Nouvelle-France.’ Furthermore, this mentality persists today, as in the statement by Jean-Michel Lemétayer, Président de la Fédération Nationale des Syndicats d’Exploitants Agricoles (FNSEA) – ‘La France est belle parce qu’elle est cultivée.’ 3. In his analysis of this same passage, Réal Ouellet also sees Cartier’s vision as utilitarian and further describes the passage as a ‘painting’: ‘Certes, l’accent est placé ici sur la fonctionnalité d’un lieu propice au ravitaillement: la terre est belle parce qu’elle est labourable, les arbres sont beaux parce qu’on en peut faire des mâts. Mais déjà commence à se dessiner une perspective: les éléments ne sont plus juxtaposés sur le même plan, mais sériés dans l’espace, organisés en tableau.’ (93; Certainly the accent is placed here on the functionality of a place fit for providing fresh supplies: the land is beautiful because it is arable, the trees are beautiful because one

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

Notes to pages 17–24 can make masts from them. But already a perspective is beginning to form: the elements are no longer juxtaposed on the same plane, but arranged in space, organized as a painting.) In his inventory of Cartier’s more than a hundred similes, Lebel also concludes that they are based on France, Brittany, Saint-Malo, Bordeaux, and the Seine, 75–6. See also LeHuenen, 35. While many critics have analysed the depiction of the village (see for example, McKay, 17), among the rare articles to discuss the surrounding landscape is that of Gagnon, ‘Jacques Cartier en Arcadie.’ Melançon further notes that, in such comparisons with France, ‘l’analogie ne s’établit pas tant avec le paysage réel du Vieux Monde contemporain qu’avec sa stylisation idéalisée dans le mythe de l’âge d’or ou dans le jardin d’Éden,’ 5. (Analogy is not based as much on the real landscape of the contemporary Old World as it is on its idealized stylization in the myth of the Golden Age or in the Garden of Eden.) Melançon’s equation of Eden with the Renaissance vision may seem to contradict Bureau’s distinction, but Melançon also mentions ‘Utopie’ (10) as another source of the ‘paysages idéalisés’ that typify the period (4). In the terms of our study, naming imposes ‘culture’ on ‘nature’ or, in many cases, simply overlooks the latter, as suggested by Morissonneau (‘Dénommer,’ 86). Morissonneau also confirms LeHuenen’s contentions by noting that a full 51 per cent of Cartier’s place names are hagiographic (88). For more on naming see also Perron, 48; L. LeBlanc, 46. As Bureau notes, ‘Avec ces croix, une première géographie se dessine, celle d’une Nouvelle-France inventée, que l’on peut cartographier, et qui n’existe précisément que sur la carte.’ (153; With these crosses a first geography forms, that of a New France that is invented, that one can map, and that exists precisely on the map alone.) See McKay (15–32) for a detailed discussion of the colonizing function of map components, from language and lines to viewpoint and imagery. A ‘toise’ is about two yards. One need only compare this description to that of Sagard in his Le grand voyage, 116, to see the degree to which Sagard’s description reflects not only the European vision but also Champlain’s text nearly verbatim. As Carile notes, the adjectives beau, agréable, plaisant, bon define functional qualities linked to the soil’s fertility, not to aesthetic values, 87. Although Bellenger notes an appreciation of mountainous terrain in the late sixteenth-century writings of Villamont and Saint-Amant, their very uniqueness confirms the general accuracy of Bureau’s contention, 121–33.

Notes to pages 29–32

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12. If this episode does not contradict the claims, it must at least soften accusations that Champlain discredited or ignored Cartier, beginning with Lescarbot and extending to the present: ‘the effacement of his predecessor’s work’ (Peters, 96). 13. This painting has generated considerable debate concerning attribution, dating, and even meaning, which in turn has led to interesting issues of historical context. Gagnon, for example, in La conversion, traces the Jesuit practice of using images to illustrate and cement lessons in the Catholic faith, then analyses the painting at hand in an annex (109–19) to propose a Jesuit painter, not the Recollet Frère Luc, who visited Canada in 1670–1, five years after the death of Anne of Austria. In a later article, Gagnon and Lacroix further substantiate this position by citing an entry from the Journal des Jésuites in 1666, noting that the Huron nation had commissioned a painting to celebrate its conversion to Catholicism. However, Monteyne maintains that by the 1660s the Jesuits were in disfavour and being replaced by the Recollets, who reported directly to the national church of France, not to the Pope as did the Jesuits, who would not have sanctioned a painting wherein faith was disseminated by the French state. Monteyne thus rehabilitates Frère Luc as the painting’s author and concludes that ‘the painted allegory that depicts benevolent exchange obscures both the creation of a subject receptive to royal power, and also the subordination of church to monarchical government necessary for the creation of France as an absolutist nation state,’ 20. Monteyne’s analysis certainly confirms Mitchell’s notion of the ‘imperial power’ of landscape representation (‘Imperial Landscape’). 14. See Pichette (cited by Gagnon and Lacroix, 16). 15. For an explanation of the seigneurial system, see Lacoursière, Provencher, and Vaugeois, 63–4. 16. Chateaubriand even uses the term ‘nouvel Éden’ to describe the New World in the prologue to Atala in much the same vein as Bureau’s initial definition of a land of original nature, untamed forces, and wild forests (Chateaubriand, 12). I continue to use the term ‘Edenic’ throughout this chapter to describe the vision of a nature that is primitive, diverse, irregular, profuse, and changing to provide a stark contrast with Bureau’s definition of the utopian vision, although the term ‘Romantic’ is far more common. 17. As Gasbarrone puts it, ‘What French Canadians lacked, in Garneau’s view, was not a story, but a voice; not a memory, but a witness to that memory; not a history, in short, but an historian,’ ‘Narrative,’ 34. For an extensive excerpt from and discussion of the Durham Commission report, see

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18.

19.

20. 21.

Notes to pages 32–4 Lacoursière, Provencher, and Vaugeois, 244–62. For more on the impact of the failed patriots’ rebellions, see the beginning of chapter two. Not only do the words ‘grand’ and ‘sublime’ occur with great frequency in Chateaubriand’s prose works describing the New World, but his vision seizes upon the same traits of variety and vastness as does Garneau’s, as we see in the following passage from Chateaubriand’s Voyage en Amérique: ‘À mesure que le canot avance, s’ouvrent de nouvelles scènes et de nouveaux points de vue; tantôt ce sont des vallées solitaires et riantes, tantôt des collines nues; ici c’est une forêt de cyprès, dont on aperçoit les portiques sombres; là c’est un bois léger d’érables, où le soleil se joue comme à travers une dentelle.’ (132–3; As the canoe advances, new scenes and new viewpoints open up; at times there are solitary, laughing valleys; at others bare hills; here is a forest of Cypress trees, whose dark porticos are visible; there are small stands of maples, where the sun plays as through lace.) Moreover, Chateaubriand exerted great influence on French Canada’s fledgling writers, including Boucher de Boucherville, Papineau, Chauveau, Gérin-Lajoie, and Conan, to name only those who cite him in passages included in this book. Not merely an interpretation of Cartier’s vision, this way of seeing characterizes Garneau’s own travel writings, as Wyczynski notes in speaking of the historian’s Voyage en Angleterre et en France (1855), especially his descriptive tendencies during his voyage down the Saint Lawrence River. In a similar vein, Soeur Paul-du-Sauveur notes of Garneau’s Histoire du Canada that more than half of his similes and metaphors come from nature, 188. See Lanctot, 17. McGregor was a fellow traveller with Garneau during his visit to France in 1832–3 (see Bergeron, 73). One might suppose that Charlevoix – ‘le créateur de l’histoire du Canada,’ according to Garneau (48), and whose viewpoint is often panoramic (R. Ouellet, 95) – might be a source of Garneau’s descriptions of Canada’s ‘natural beauties,’ but Charlevoix’s descriptive passages reveal ‘mental structures’ far closer to Bureau’s utopianism than to an Edenic or Romantic vision. Consider Charlevoix’s (nonetheless fascinating) description of Quebec City, which he paints as a future Paris: ‘que l’Isle d’Orléans & les deux Bords des deux Rivières, qui forment ce Port, découvriront de belles Prairies, de riches Côteaux & des Campagnes fertiles, & il ne leur manque pour cela que d’être peuplées … que le Port sera environné de Bâtimens superbes, & qu’on y aura trois ou quatre cent Navires chargés des richesses.’ (Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle-France, vol. 3, letter 3, 73; when l’île d’Orléans and both shores of the two rivers that form this port display beautiful meadows, rich hills, and fertile fields, and

Notes to pages 34–8

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for that they are lacking only in people … when the port is surrounded by superb buildings; and when there are three or four hundred ships laden with riches.) When, in short, nature yields to culture, Quebec will be utopic, and indeed, like Utopia, the scene here is projected into the future. 22. For more on the sublime see McKay, 51–63. 23. Hubbard, Thomas Davies, 36; Harper, Painting, 49. The summer house was constructed by General Haldiman, then Governor of Quebec (Hubbard, Early Canada, 57–9), who apparently also relished ‘the sublime.’ 24. Marcotte, ‘Garneau,’ 15–16. Among the first to note the analogy inherent in both Plamandon’s painting and Garneau’s poem was Chauveau (chapter three) in a review in the Canadien of 30 April 1838: ‘Le dernier rejeton d’une nation noble et intrépide qui a disparu devant nous, comme les castors de nos rivières, les élans de nos bois; et comme nous-mêmes, peut-être, nous disparaîtrons devant une nation plus puissante!’ (Quoted in Chauveau, ‘François,’ xliv; The last remnant of a noble and intrepid nation that disappeared before us, like the beavers from our rivers, the elks from our woods; and like ourselves, perhaps, we will disappear before a more powerful nation!) In a superb essay, all the more so in my view because it analyses in detail and in tandem a text (Garneau’s ‘Le dernier Huron’) and painting (Plamandon’s Zacharie Vincent), Findlay also demonstrates that ‘the Huron remnant is figured as synecdoche for a doomed society and for a holism that will prove no match for modernity’s divided and divisive labour,’ 666. Findlay also points out the irony that Plamandon’s painting was purchased and expatriated by none other than the detestable Lord Durham! On the significance of the poem, see also Morissonneau, La Terre, 74. Chapter 2. Race, Place, and Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Short Story 1. See, for example, Lacoursière, Provencher, and Vaugeois for a straightforward discussion of the situation after the Conquest (154–6) and in the early nineteenth century (243–62). 2. Biron, Dumont, and Nardout-Lafarge, 57. See also Cotnam, ‘Du romancier,’ 171. It should be noted that several of the stories discussed in this chapter occur before or at the time of the rebellions, not after them. Thanks to Québec Studies for permission to reprint parts of this discussion, which appeared in an article (Berg, ‘Landscape and Identity’). 3. For some critics, like Ouellet, Beaulieu, and Tremblay, the Amerindian not only incarnates but even inculcates a spirit of independence in the French-Canadian identity, beginning in the French colonial period and

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4.

5.

6.

7.

Notes to pages 38–45 extending well beyond the Conquest to the present day: ‘Il ne faudrait pas croire que se termine avec la Conquête anglaise cette affirmation d’une identité liée à la comparaison avec le Sauvage, présenté comme nomade et rétif à tout encadrement hiérarchique ou social contraignant.’ (67; One should not believe that with the Conquest ends this affirmation of identity linked to comparison with the Native, presented as a nomad resisting any form of hierarchical or social constraint.) La Bibliothèque canadienne, vol. 5, nos. 5/6 (Oct. and Nov. 1827), ed. M. Bibaud (Montreal: Imprimerie du Montréal Herald), 176–84 and 210–15 respectively. Although the first instalment clearly states right under the subtitle that it is ‘traduite librement du Truth-Teller’ (176), this notation is not included in Huston’s famous Répertoire national, vol. 1 (Montreal: Lovell et Gobson, 1848), 156–73, and thus the original source in The Truth Teller of 14 July 1827 wasn’t tracked down until 1984 by Guildo Rousseau. In his ‘Introduction,’ Rousseau makes a case for an initial FrenchCanadian author (18–24), but in any case, as Lemire shows, it is the French tale that inaugurates not only subsequent versions but an entire genre and ‘sert de canevas à notre littérature d’inspiration indienne’ (Les grands thèmes, 6–7; serves as a canvas for our literature of Indian inspiration). In his Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France, vol. 1, Charlevoix traces the deeds of P. Mesnard in the New World from 1656–62 (323, 329, 334, 356). From another direction, the story itself has Mesnard recruited for duty in the New World by one ‘madame Bouillon,’ presumably Geneviève de Bulion, whose Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal had founded the Hôtel Dieu in Montréal in 1642. In the words of Lemire: ‘L’Iroquoise s’oriente vers la littérature nationale en exploitant le mythe du “Bon Sauvage” et l’exotisme romantique.’ (Les grands thèmes, 221; L’Iroquoise moves towards national literature by exploiting the myth of the ‘Good Savage’ and Romantic exoticism.) Previously called ‘Martyre d’une jeune Huronne,’ the painting’s title was changed in 2003 to reflect the link between it and the story ‘L’Iroquoise’ proposed by Didier Prioul in ‘Joseph Légaré, paysagiste’ 193, 302. Thanks to the Service des Archives of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal for allowing me to consult the dossier for this painting. Others, including Porter (cited in Prioul, 259), trace the painting’s source to the legend of Françoise Gonannhatenha as recounted by Charlevoix, Histoire générale, vol. 2, 464–7 (itself, we might add, based on an episode from the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères (Le Gobien et al.). Prioul’s title for the painting seems an effective compromise between the two theories, since it hyphenates Brunon (from the story) and Gonannhatenha

Notes to pages 47–63

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

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(from the legend). For the purposes of this chapter, dealing with the question of national identity, the immediate source is irrelevant, since, as Rousseau contends: ‘La légende, comme le mythe, dégage les lignes de force d’une sensibilité collective, selon la symbolique propre à un peuple et à son univers mental … C’est pourquoi une légende donnée renvoie à une autre ou elle s’impose comme l’archétype d’une série de variantes qui enrichissent le trésor commun et se propagent sous des formes difféentes.’ (13; The legend, like the myth, uncovers the lines of force of a collective feeling, according to the symbolism characteristic of a people and its mental universe … That’s why a given legend alludes to another or dominates as the archetype of a series of variants that enrich the common treasure and propagate in different forms.) For an interesting discussion of Légaré’s treatment of the Amerindian and the habitant, see Poulter, 11–25. See, for example, Porter, Joseph Légaré, 65; McNairn, 238. See also Belton, 132. This is a blatant anachronism since Bigot died before the appearance of Chateaubriand’s writings. The representation of the Amerindian as a ‘ghost’ is discussed eloquently by Findlay in his analysis of Garneau’s poem, ‘Le dernier Huron,’ based on Antoine Plamandon’s painting Zacharie Vincent: ‘Plamandon, like a number of his Canadian contemporaries, has a multiple view of the spectral Indigene as a living ghost and potent omen of the intensifying challenges to be faced by an increasingly outnumbered francophone minority,’ 659. An additional issue goes beyond the limits of this book and awaits those versed in feminist criticism: is the fact that a female protagonist dominates four of the works due simply to the influence of Chateaubriand’s Atala or due to a sensitivity to the woman as being doubly ‘colonized’ and thus doubly ‘heroic’? This written preservation of the national heritage allies Beaugrand with Taché, as Ricard explains in his ‘Préface,’ 17. As Ricard concludes, in assessing the story itself as a cultural rallying point, ‘Comment, sans la transgression des voyageurs de la chasse-galerie, sans ce récit merveilleux d’un péché, comment tous les bûcherons en foule ne déserteraient-ils pas leurs chantiers pour courir eux-mêmes vers leurs blondes, dans le Sud? Mais cela leur devient inutile dès qu’il existe le mythe, dès qu’en entendant la fable leur désir se délivre et qu’à titre d’auditeurs ils commettent, eux aussi, le délit et pactisent avec Satan.’ (12; How, without the transgression of the travellers in the chasse-galerie, without this marvellous tale of sin, how could all the crowd of woodsmen

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Notes to pages 64–74

not desert their workplace to run towards their own blondes down South? But that becomes useless in their case, since the myth exists, since listening to the fable relieves their desire and as listeners they too commit a sin and form a pact with Satan.) 15. Julien was so linked to national identity that one of his depictions of the 1837 rebellion (Un vieux de ‘37) was adopted by the radical revolutionary group Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) in 1970. See Jean Provencher, 200. 16. As Landry notes in his analysis of the painting La Chasse-galerie (1906), Julien ‘fait preuve d’une verve digne d’un conteur, dans un style inimitable dévelopé au service des journaux qui, à la fin du XIXe siècle, dépendaient d’artistes comme lui pour illustrer les actualités. Son humour truculant s’exprime avec une vivacité particulière dans la caricature d’hommes politiques et dans l’illustration des légendes du terroir québécois’ (92; demonstrates a verve worth of a storyteller, in an inimitable style honed in the service of newspapers which, at the end of the nineteenth century, depended on artists like him to illustrate the news. His colourful humour emerges with special vividness in his caricatures of politicians and his illustrations of popular Quebec legends). As further evidence of the legend’s durability as an icon of defiance, the flying canoe appears today on the label of a popular beer, called Maudite (cursed), which includes the image of the Devil himself. Chapter 3. The Father’s Land Lost: Country versus City in the Early Novel 1. The term ‘rural novel’ is used by Chapman to translate various designations such as ‘roman de la terre,’ ‘roman du territoire,’and ‘roman paysan,’ Siting, 33. Perron uses the term ‘agrarian novel’ to describe the same corpus, 152, which Vanasse finds to be uniquely French Canadian, ‘Introduction,’ 12. 2. For an excellent analysis of the opening description as a means of creating a sense of realism, see Andrès, 366–7. Servais-Maquoi’s judgment that ‘dans l’ œuvre de Lacombe, la terre n’est jamais l’objet de descriptions concrètes, de tableaux colorés, mais plutôt de fades louanges et d’apologies superficielles’ (25; in Lacombe’s work, the land is never the object of concrete descriptions, of colourful paintings, but rather of insipid praise and superficial defences) clearly does not apply to this passage. 3. Indeed, the conflation of ‘city’ and ‘anglophone’ is no accident, since by 1850 about half of the population of Montreal was English-speaking (Ouellet, Beaulieu, and Tremblay, 68).

Notes to pages 75–92

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4. The authors of an important website describe the situation following the failed rebellions as follows: ‘Après cette défaite, des gens plus conservateurs, dont le clergé, vont diriger le peuple: ce sont eux qui déveloperont l’idéologie de la conservation. Les Canadiens français se réfugient dans les campagnes et développent un mode de vie, axé sur la religion, l’agriculture et l’exaltation du passé, mode de vie qui leur permettra d’éviter l’assimilation promise par Lord Durham.’ (After this defeat, more conservative figures, among them the clergy, will direct the people: it is they who will develop the ideology of conservation. French Canadians seek refuge in the countryside and develop a way of life oriented towards religion, agriculture, and exaltation of the past, a way of life that will allow them to avoid the assimilation promised by Lord Durham.) http://www.litterature-quebecoise.org/terroir2.htm. See also McKay, 95–7. 5. I concur with the conclusion of Ouellet, Beaulieu, and Tremblay that the events of the novel (if not the narrator’s pronouncements) tend to validate the nomadism they find as a permanent component of the FrenchCanadian identity, 70. See also Chapman, Siting, 35. 6. Biron, Dumont, and Nardout-Lafarge describe ‘une des caractéristiques fondamentales de la littérature québécoise, à savoir sa relation profonde et comme naturelle avec cette forme nouvelle qu’est le journal’ (62; one of the fundamental characteristics of Quebec literature, namely its profound and natural-like relationship with that new form which is the newspaper). They cite especially the role played by Le Canadien, 67. 7. Cited by Prioul, ‘Joseph Légaré, Le Canadien,’ 360. See also McKay, 100. 8. Chauveau represented Quebec County in the Legislative Assembly of Canada from 1844 to 1855 and in the Canadian House of Commons Legislative Assembly of Quebec from 1867 to 1873. In the interim, he served as superintendent of public instruction in Eastern Canada. In 1867 he became the first premier of the province of Quebec and resigned in 1873 to serve in the Senate of Canada, of which he was speaker from 1873 to 1874. 9. See especially Véronique Roy, 351–5. 10. In this regard alone I find it impossible to concur with Duquette in his otherwise excellent article that Chauveau’s presentation of Quebec City is negative (192). 11. Morissonneau sees the ending as representative of two basic tendencies, which also explain French-Canadian fascination with the North as the promised land and a place of regeneration (La terre, 68). 12. For a discussion of the different value systems implicit in the novel, see Lemire, 22.

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Notes to pages 93–105

13. Duquette, 194. See also Falardeau, Notre société, 32. I find these qualifiedly positive readings of the novel more convincing than André Sénécal’s characterization of its ‘false solutions’ in his nonetheless thoughtful article, 339. 14. See, for example, the portrait of the protagonist’s father, a Marine captain constantly doing battle ‘contre les Anglais et les sauvages’ (142; against the English and the naturals) just before the Conquest: ‘Au moral, le seigneur d’Haberville possédait toutes les qualités qui distinguait les anciens Canadiens de noble race. (Gaspé, 143; Morally, the master of Haberville possessed all the qualities that distinguished the old Canadians of noble lineage.) Chapter 4. New Horizons in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel 1. See Lacoursière, Provencher, and Vaugeois, 293–4. 2. Gérin-Lajoie (1824–82) was a journalist and librarian to Parliament who also authored the famous poem/song ‘Un Canadien errant.’ 3. See Sirois, ‘Babylone,’ 26; and Bureau, 155. 4. For futher discussion of the historical context, see Major, 17; and Morissonneau, La terre, 69. 5. The term ‘reconquest’ appears in several discussions of the novel. See Biron, Dumont, and Nardout-Lafarge, 135; Falardeau, Notre société, 24; and Servais-Maquoi, 36. 6. Although, according to Major, with a more resigned tone than in Jean Rivard, 134–5. 7. The characters are in 1845, the narrator in 1848. 8. (1) Economic prosperity: As the protagonist proclaims, ‘Le Canada peut être à la fois pays agricole et pays manufacturier’ (435; Canada can be both an agricultural country and an industrial country); (2) Classes: Charmenil rails repeatedly against urban social and economic inequities in his letters to Jean Rivard, decrying especially ‘le contraste frappant entre l’opulence et la misère.’ (315; the striking contrast between opulence and poverty); (3) Gender: Louise, for example, ‘pouvait se féliciter … d’être, dans sa sphère, aussi utile, aussi accomplie que son mari dans la sienne’ (428; could congratulate herself … for being in her sphere as useful, as accomplished as her husband in his.) Although the spheres are different, both are valorized; Van Schendel’s judgment that Gérin-Lajoie relegates Louise to an ‘anonymous state of Goodness’ and that ‘this woman doesn’t exist’ seems overstated to me (‘L’amour,’156); (4) Ethnic groups: The priest’s statement that ‘Il y a quelque chose de bon à prendre dans les mœurs et les usages de chaque

Notes to pages 107–16

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

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peuple; et notre contact avec des populations d’origine et de contrées différentes peut, sans porter atteinte à notre caractère national, introduire dans nos habitudes certaines modifications qui ne seront pas sans influence sur notre avenir, et en particulier sur notre avenir matériel’ (448–9; There is something good to be taken from the mores and customs of each people; and our contact with people of different origins and from other countries can, without threatening our national character, introduce into our usages certain modifications that won’t be without consequence for our future, and in particular our economic future) reaches far into the future towards today’s multiculturalism. The term ‘grand dérangement’ is used to describe the British deportation (1755–1762) from Grand-Pré, in present-day Nova Scotia, of Frenchspeaking Acadians, many of whom became the ‘Cajuns’ of Louisiana. See Lacoursière, Provencher, and Vaugeois, 132. See, for example, Saint-Martin, ‘Postface,’ 219. As one might expect, psychological studies of the novel abound. LeMoine, editor of Conan’s œuvres romanesques, uses a biographical approach to characterize the work of Laure Conan, whose given name is Félicité Angers, as dominated by a failed love affair and a father fixation; see LeMoine, ‘De Félicité Angers,’ and ‘Introduction’; see also Sœur Jean-de-l’Immaculée. Among the numerous psychocritical analyses of the novel, nearly all of which focus on the father/daughter relationship, are those of Blodgett; Carr; Cotnam, ‘Angéline’; Gallays; and François Ouellet. Many feminist approaches are also ‘psychocritical’ and tend to focus on Conan’s/ Angéline’s reaction to the masculine power structure; see note 18 below. See, for example, Lauzière, ‘Le roman,’ 251; and the opening words of LeMoine’s ‘De Félicité Angers,’ 9. As Carr notes, ‘Angéline loses her father, her beauty, and the love of her fiancé Maurice within the space of three pages against a backdrop formed by memory of the loss suffered at the Conquest’ (997); see also Brochu, ‘La technique,’ 119–20 and Gasbarrone, ‘Le chronotype,’ 107. Observations on onomastics can be found in Green, 7; Meadwell, 74–5; and François Ouellet, 203. Amprimoz, ‘Polarisation,’ counts twenty-two references to the garden (100), which he links to Paradise (94), as do numerous other critics, including Heidenreich, 39. The importance of reflections, mirrors, and doubling in the novel is underscored by Gallays; Gianolio, 101–34; and Raoul, ‘Cette,’ 38–54. Allard considers the swan as a symbol of the poetic voice, which rises yet dies as it sings, the traditional ‘swan’s song’ (383, 388–92).

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Notes to pages 117–32

16. Bourbonnais demonstrates how Conan enhanced the symbolic value of autumn in her revisions of the novel, ‘Vingt fois,’ 47–8. 17. Amprimoz, ‘Polarisation,’ counts twenty-six references to the sea (99), which he also analyses (91–2), as do Biron, Dumont, and Nardout-Lafarge, 147; Bourbonnais, ‘Vingt fois,’ 46; Gallays, 11; Gianolio, 120–1; Heidenreich, 45; and Smart, 50. 18. As Lori Saint-Martin puts it, reading the novel amounts to following the ideological evolution concerning women: from the angel to the disappointed woman, the neurotic, and the free woman (‘Postface,’ 220). Among the many feminist studies are those of Green, Robert, Smart, and Verthuy. 19. Brochu analyses this same passage from a phenomenological perspective and reaches similar conclusions concerning the movement towards spirituality and transcendance, which he terms ‘évasion verticale’ (vertical escape), ‘Le Cercle,’ 98–9. 20. Amprimoz, ‘Polarisation,’ counts fourteen references to ‘le ciel’ (99) and twenty-six to ‘lumière’ (100). 21. Heidenreich finds a similar tripartite structure in the novel, although she sees the components as coequal rather than hierarchical, 46. 22. Smart uses the same birth metaphor to describe Laure Conan’s relationship to writing, 23. Allard also sees Angéline’s writing as an affirmation of her individuality, 387. 23. See also Bourbonnais, ‘Angéline,’ 84. For more on the technique of ‘mise en abyme’ see chapter 9, note 9. 24. In an article on ‘doubling’ in women’s diary writing, Raoul notes a similar effect of creating a chain of ancestors, 41. 25. See also Green, 5. 26. Beaudry, ‘Ozias Leduc, Peintre,’ 16. See also Éthier-Blais, 42. 27. Le Cumulus bleu is one of more than fifteen landscapes done by Leduc between 1900 and 1922 (See Ostiguy, 101) and the first of nine ‘symbolist’ landscapes done from 1913 to 1921 (See Lacroix, Ozias, 183). 28. François-Marc Gagnon sees a certain irony in the fact that lightning emanates from clouds like the one that floats over the tree here, ‘Leduc,’ 38. Chapter 5. Impressionism and Nationalism in the Early Twentieth Century 1. For a summary of the historical context see Biron, Dumont, and NardoutLafarge, 151; and Jean Provencher, 192–203. 2. From a speech presented to the conservative Société du parler français in 1904, included in Biron, Dumont, and Nardout-Lafarge, 171.

Notes to pages 133–49

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3. For a discussion of these aspects of Impressionism, see, for example, Duval, Canadian Impressionism, 1–4; and Berg, The Visual Novel, 161–6. 4. A member of Les Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes, an order committed to education, Marie-Victorin (Conrad Kirouac), 1885–1944, also belonged to l’Association catholique de la jeunesse canadienne-française (ACJC) for which ‘l’action catholique et l’action nationale ne se séparent pas’ (Rumilly, 29; Catholic action and national action do not differ). See also Gaulin, 228–31. 5. Indeed, Marie-Victorin quotes a lengthy description from Cartier, which contains the already familiar formula that the beautiful aspects of the natural landscape are those ‘qui semblaient avoir été semés par des laboureurs’ (Croquis, 224; that seemed to have been sowed by peasants). 6. For a fascinating study focusing on the lingering presence of the Amerindian ghost in the Quebec mentality, see Findlay, 656–72. 7. For a discussion of the verbal components of Impressionist prose, see, for example, Berg, Imagery, 205–12. 8. All four are included, for example, in Duval’s Canadian Impressionism, 8. 9. Similarly, in a probing essay, Trépanier, discussing the specific techniques by which the painters of this generation achieved such effects, also links them to Impressionism, with the caveats that ‘toutefois, les peintres canadiens n’abandonneront que rarement la perspective tridimensionnelle. La ligne contour ou, tout au moins, le dessin sous-jacent reste souvent présent, maintenant une nette différenciation des plans.’ (15; however, the Canadian painters will only rarely abandon threedimensional perspective. The contour line or, at least, the underlying drawing often remains present, maintaining a clear differentiation of planes.) 10. As Hill states, ‘starting around 1900, the theme of a winter stream coursing between snow-covered banks was one he would return to frequently, interpreting it with an increasingly Impressionist palette and touch. While the rushing waters evoke the change of seasons and thus the passage of time and of life, their prime subject is the colour and light of the Canadian winter – a subject ignored by the preceding generation of artists but revived by students of the French Impressionists,’ ‘Marc-Aurèle,’ 42. 11. Harper makes a similar distinction between Cullen and the Impressionists: ‘Cullen recognized that cast shadows on snow were blue since the snow reflected the blue sky. Where the sunlight fell directly on the snow, he built up a gleaming light impasto … He paints as an Impressionist, but instead of loading his canvas with unmixed pure pigment in Monet’s manner, he fuses the various colours into a tonal harmony,’ Painting, 233–4.

326

Notes to pages 151–8

12. As Sicotte notes: ‘Contrairement à Morrice, qui a besoin de l’ailleurs pour s’accomplir comme peintre, Gagnon doit se réfléchir dans le pays natal, l’embrasser du regard, y trouver ses repères et y projeter sa pensée créatrice.’ (‘Par-delà,’ 95–6; Contrary to Morrice, who needs an elsewhere to fulfil himself as a painter, Gagnon must reflect himself in his native land, embrace it at a glance, find in it his reference points and project his creative thoughts onto it.) 13. Indeed, Gagnon had participated in an exhibition entitled ‘Les peintres de neige’ at the Galerie Reitlinger in Paris in 1914 (see Sicotte, ‘Par-delà,’ 124). 14. For example, François-Marc Gagnon, ‘Clarence A. Gagnon’; and Reid, A Concise History, 130. 15. According to Lacroix, ‘There is no doubt that, in the first quarter of the 20th century, landscape painting was an artistic and political issue in Canada. By renewing the interpretation of nature in their country, Canadian artists became part of a movement of national affirmation. That they may have borrowed from European aesthetic movements (Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism or Fauvism) was of no importance; their works made it possible to rediscover and re-appropriate the Canadian landscape through a new approach to painting,’ Suzor-Coté: Light, 220. 16. Porter, ‘Du singulier,’ 9. See also Boulizon, 25: ‘Le paysage québécois est donc une Nature, rejointe, modifiée, humanisée, civilisée par une Culture.’ (The Quebecois landscape is thus Nature, joined, modified, humanized, civilized, by Culture.) Chapter 6. Space, Place, and a Race That Will Not Die 1. Gourdeau identifies twenty-seven illustrators of the novel, including the three discussed here, although she does not analyse them (106, note 3). 2. Falardeau notes that Quebec’s rural population, more than 60 per cent of the total population in 1901, is only slightly more than 50 per cent by 1911 and 36 per cent by 1921, and that the land, formerly divided clearly into agricultural and forest sectors, becomes a ‘mosaic’ of regions brought closer together by the railways and diversified by industrialization, especially mining, paper mills, and hydroelectic power (‘Vie,’ 27). 3. See Chapman, Siting, 32, who draws her information from G. Gagnon, chapter five. 4. Hémon (1916). Suzor-Coté’s drawings are ‘charcoal on either cream or grey paper and range in size from 21x26 cm to 48x63 cm’ according to Thom, 10. 5. Silvie Bernier reaches a similar conclusion regarding Suzor-Coté’s faithful rendition of the novel and of its interpretation in the original prefaces by

Notes to pages 159–61

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

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Louvigny de Montigny and Émile Boutroux (‘L’illustration,’ 79). See also her Du texte, ‘Deux visions,’ 111–47. Like the article, the book chapter provides a superb analysis of both painters’ illustrations, based on their differing visions of the earth and social classes on the one hand and their handling of viewpoint and space on the other. Hémon (1933). My sincere thanks to the staff of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto for enabling me to view this edition. Information on the materials used for Gagnon’s illustrations comes from Thom, 24. For more on Gagnon’s use of colour, see S. Bernier, ‘L’illustration,’ 86; Thom, 32; and Sicotte, 207. See also S. Bernier, Du texte, 139. I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa for enabling me to view Lemieux’s book. For a detailed discussion of ‘horizontality’ in Lemieux’s works see Brulotte, 47–57. On the simplification and purification of the landscape see, especially, Carani, 110–28; see also Grandbois, 15. According to Anne Hébert, ‘L’œuvre de Jean Paul Lemieux, si particulière et personnelle qu’elle soit n’en demeure pas moins la meilleure introduction, la plus précise, la plus exacte, la plus rêveuse et la plus poétique à notre pays.’ (‘Avant-propos,’ 13; The work of Jean Paul Lemieux, as particular and personal as it may be, remains nonetheless the best introduction, the most precise, accurate, dreamy, and poetic, to our country.) See also L. Vigneault, ‘Défis,’ 161–3. Since we examined Suzor-Coté’s and Gagnon’s work extensively in the previous chapter, an additional word on Lemieux’s painting in relation to ‘the basic values of the true Quebec’ seems warranted here. Lemieux readily acknowledges his own obsession with the passage of time: ‘Ce qui me hante le plus, c’est le temps, le temps qui passe, le temps qui s’est passé, la dimension même du temps.’ (in Brulotte, 113; What haunts me the most is time, time passing, time past, the very dimension of time.) See also Hébert, ‘Notice,’ 5, and ‘Avant-propos,’ 10. The notion of time in turn entails that of memory, as Lemieux states, ‘J’essaye d’exprimer … dans chaque tableau, le monde intérieur de mes souvenirs.’ (in Mégret, 9; I try to express … in each painting, the interior world of my memories.) According to Lassaigne, ‘Lemieux a fait avec la poussière du temps une oeuvre durable.’ (Jean, 2; From the dust of time, Lemieux has made an enduring work.) Lassaigne’s description brings us to yet another point of convergence between Lemieux’s art and the Quebec tradition, in painting as well as in literature: the definition and survival of the national identity through the work of art.

328

Notes to pages 164–74

13. Several perceptive studies have emphasized Hémon’s use of landscape description, especially in the opening chapter. Duchatelet, for example, was among the first to note that the description is used to mark Maria’s emotional evolution, 104. Deschamps notes a progression in the descriptive passages from realism to Impressionism, then Symbolism, 51, 54, 55–6. Although Demers’s reading of the opening chapter is oriented more towards the social setting than the landscape, her analysis is subtle and serves to counterbalance the somewhat pessimistic evaluation of Duchatelet: ‘It is worth noting that while the adjectives he chooses to describe this “harsh existence in a stern land” actually personify natural conditions, the merriness, laughter, and good humour of the people themselves serve to dispel or, at any rate, mitigate the gloom,’ 33. For more on the opening description, see Labonté and Moussally, 139–40; and LeBras, 8–9. 14. On the ambivalence of Samuel Chapdelaine, see also Morissonneau, La terre, 116–17. 15. Warwick, ‘Maria,’ 38, is thinking, no doubt of Baudelaire’s ‘Chant d’automne,’ where, indeed, the onset of winter and death outweigh autumn’s potential beauty, which I don’t find so true of Hémon’s text. Indeed, Gagnon’s painting Octobre portrays autumn at its most regal while placing a man plowing inside a fenced field in the foreground, again emphasizing the balance between between nature and culture. 16. On the importance of the window in the novel, see Northey, 85; Gaboury, 226; and Demers’s discussion of both critics, 59–60. See also Perron, 190–1. 17. The echoes of this voice resound throughout francophone literature, from as nearby as Savard’s Menaud, maître-draveur, to which we turn momentarily, and Carrier’s Il n’y a pas de pays sans grand-père (chapter ten; see especially Talbot, 137–45), to as far away as DesMarais’s ‘Apologie du peuple français de Louisiane.’ 18. Approaching the novel from a more literary viewpoint, Chapman reaches a similar conclusion: ‘Other places do not just serve as points of comparison for the reader. Rather they are transformed in the text into a network of places desired by different protagonists (from Laura Chapdelaine’s “vieilles paroisses” to Paradis’s “pays d’en haut”). Rather than offering an unambiguous endorsement of the settlers’ identification with their land, the novel explores the diversity of human responses to space, both real and imagined’ (50). 19. Cotnam goes so far as call Menaud ‘le premier roman québécois,’ because ideology is subordinated to artistry, ‘Du romancier,’181. 20. The hybrid nature of Savard’s text has fostered considerable debate as to

Notes to pages 174–81

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

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how it should be classified, as suggested by Robidoux and Renaud: ‘L’emploi systématique de la métaphore, le recours régulier à la manière épique ainsi que la fréquence des mouvements lyriques contribuent à faire de Menaud, maître-draveur une fresque héroïque où se transforme en allégorie l’aventure réaliste des personnages.’ (41; The systematic use of metaphor, the regular reliance on the epic mode, as well as the frequency of lyrical movements contribute to make of Menaud a heroic fresco where the realistic adventures of the characters are transformed into allegory.) See also Brochu, ‘Menaud,’ 253–4; DesGagniers, 68–9; Purdy, 68; and Ricard, L’art, 29–30. Ricard’s stylistic analysis is exemplary and will be cited frquently in this chapter. The novel is traditionally divided into three parts in major studies based on the plot structure by Ricard; Robidoux and Renaud, 37–9; and Brochu, ‘Menaud,’ 252. Pierre-H. Lemieux, however, makes a strong case for a binary structure based on the the two French-Canadian ‘races’ – the paysan and the coureur de bois, 29–38, as does Boivin for masculine versus feminine space (‘Le roman’). My approach, oriented by the landscape, confirms the tripartite structure of the plot, but also verifies the binary structure of the themes. As Lepage notes, then illustrates, few works have a more complicated genetic history than Menaud, which first appeared in 1937 and was revised several times thereafter over a period of thirty years, 53. Although Savard undertook a minor revision in 1967, it is the 1964 version that has prevailed, much to the dismay of Lepage, who also eschews the placement of a comma in the title. My page references are from the Bibliothèque Québécoise edition, which includes the comma. Ricard also notes the fragmentary composition of the novel, comparing it to a ‘vitrail’ (stained-glass window), 102. For an excellent close reading of the first chapter, see Brochu, ‘Menaud,’ 256–66. Savard (1979). My sincere thanks to the staff of the McGill University Library Colgate Collection for enabling me to consult this rare edition (130 copies). Robert, La peinture, 126–7. The lyrical and musical aspects of Savard’s style were first studied systematically by Lavoie; later by Ricard, 63, 95; and DesGagniers, 13, 130. On the representation of water, see Greaves, 47–54. Ricard emphasizes the role of the metaphor in raising the novel to a mythic and epic level (29–30). See also Robidoux and Renaud, note 20 above. DesGagniers further relates Savard’s imagery to painting (167, 154).

330

Notes to pages 181–92

30. From the Rector’s speech upon reception of forty-seven works donated to the Université Laval on 26 October 1980. Cited by the painter’s friend Urgel Pelletier, 156. My sincere thanks to Dr Christian Tschanz for bringing this rare and valuable article to my attention. 31. From this perspective, I find it difficult to agree with Brochu’s contention, in an otherwise enlightening analysis, that ‘le tragique de l’oeuvre vient de ce qu’il n’y ait aucune conciliation possible entre les univers de la femme et de l’homme, de la maison et de la montagne, entre les valeurs de vie sédentaire et de vie nomade’ (‘Menaud,’ 267; the tragic dimension of the work stems from the fact that there is no possible conciliation between the universes of the woman and the man, the house and the mountain, the values of sedentary life and nomadic life). Indeed, Pierre-H. Lemieux makes a strong case for ‘reconciliation,’ based on the passage from chapter five quoted here (80–1), coupled with the eventual uniting of Marie and Le Lucon in chapter ten. 32. For Savard’s use of the present tense, see Ricard, 59–60; for the definite article, 61. 33. Pierre-H. Lemieux contends, however, that ‘l’intrigue du roman n’a rien de tellement ‘patriotique’ – (littéralement, elle n’a rien à voir avec la patrie, le Québec) – , elle est plutôt ‘pratique’, c’est-à-dire ‘sociale’ … socioéconomique ou social démocrate: rendre aux gens d’un village les richesses naturelles et leur droit d’en user, droit de drave, droit de chasse’ (33; the novel’s plot has nothing particularly ‘patriotic’ – literally, it has nothing to do with the fatherland, Quebec – it is, rather ‘practical,’ that is, ‘social’… socio-economic or social democratic: return to the village people the natural ressources and their right to use them, the right to logging, the right to hunt). His interpretation, however slanted, again highlights the importance of land, and thus the landscape, in approaching the question of French-Canadian identity. Chapter 7. Liberation and Modernity in the Wake of the War 1. On the contradiction between the prevailing conservative ideology and the concurrent economic and urban development, see Gagnon and Young, 17; their translation of Refus global is used here. 2. As Gauvreau contends, ‘l’automatisme surrationnel est la création du sol canadien’ (‘Qu’est-ce que l’art?’ 163; surrational automatism is the creation of Canadian land’). 3. Terming artists of 1945–55 a ‘génération sauvage,’ Grandpré concludes that ‘déçus, désabusés, ou simplement dépités à l’égard de tout ce que

Notes to pages 192–98

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

331

recouvre le mot culture, ils se rabbattent sur le naturel et le primitif’ (‘Du refus,’ 203; disappointed, disabused, or simply frustrated with everything covered by the word culture, they fall back on the natural and the primitive). Gagnon and Young also see cultural transformation, not eradication, as the main contribution of Borduas’s thought, x. In relation to Borduas’s tenets and method: (1) He states in an interview with Jean-René Ostiguy in 1956, ‘Des lignes, des formes et des couleurs qui n’auraient pas de justifications profondes avec le monde extérieur seraient impuissantes à exprimer le psychisme’ (in Gagnon and Young, 147; Lines, forms, colours with no profound justification in the external world would be powerless to express the psyche); (2) On the role of technique and knowledge see Robert, Borduas, 131–3; (3) ‘Le monde intérieur qui venait de s’ouvrir à Borduas n’était pas un monde sans objets, ni formes, ni figures’ (Gagnon, Paul-Émile Borduas, 145; the interior world that opened up for Borduas was not a world without objects, forms, and figures); (4) Gauvreau describes the painter’s method and titling in ‘L’épopée,’ 43; (5) In his essay ‘Projections libérantes,’ Borduas describes the goal of ‘l’automatisme surrationnel: l’espoir de saisir la forme de nos désirs les plus immédiats, les plus exigeants’ (102; superrational automatism: the attempt to grasp the form of our most immediate, our most exacting desires). Trans. Ellenwood. The visual acuity of Gauvreau is evident in the stage directions and in the inclusion of painters, paintings, and even paints in several of his works, most notably the play ‘L’anarchie du tableau’ from the collection L’imagination règne (Oeuvres, 1157–75), in which the colour blue expresses its freedom from representation: ‘Oublions donc la touche, et laissons crier notre instinct originel!’ (1160; Let’s forget about brushwork and allow our original instinct to cry out!) For more on the key role of visuality, see Roger Chamberland, 18; Marchand, 184–5; Duciaume, 333; and Mailhot, 305. Although intense, Gauvreau’s images here do no go far beyond traditional personification, linking man with nature, what he termed an image mémorante, a standard comparison between similar elements (Ellenwood, 17). As the play progresses, the imagery begins to approach what Gauvreau termed an image transfigurante, which involves an unusual combination, creating a new perception as do most surrealist metaphors. In these first works, Gauvreau’s imagery does not yet approach the image exploréenne, which is unrecognizable and thus unsettling in its novelty (see Ellenwood, 17).

332

Notes to pages 198–200

9. Bourassa, who finds the play to be based on Claudel’s symbolism, proposes Sygne de Coûfontaine (from Claudel’s play L’otage) as an onomastic ancestor based on the oddity and musicality of the two names (108–9). 10. Light is consistently linked to poetic inspiration for Gauvreau: ‘Chacun a connu la tentation vertigineuse d’ouvrir sa poitrine et de faire briller … son soleil embrasant.’ (‘Cézanne,’ 99; Everyone has felt the dizzying temptation to open his breast and let the blazing sun shine out.) Ellenwood links this passage directly to Les reflets de la nuit, 9. 11. The psychological and aesthetic symbolism of the tree is confirmed by another dramatic object from Les entrailles, ‘Le prophète dans la mer’ (Œuvres, 100–8). Here Louis Chir de Houppelande, another alter ego of the poet, must himself become a tree, so that the tree can take human form and utter its prophecies; that is, the rational, traditional self must yield to the primitive natural forces within in order to unlock the prophetic visions harboured in the imagination and released by the poet. Van Schendel sees this latter work as emblematic of Gauvreau’s ‘liberating’ approach: ‘Il s’agit d’une recherche esthétique de la libération, mieux: d’une esthétique libérante,’ ‘Claude Gauvreau,’ 241. 12. Paquin sees the death and dismemberment of women in Gauvreau’s plays as a metaphor for the destruction and reinvention of language (105). The relationship between death and poetry is also suggested in a tribute to Gauvreau written by his friend, the poet and actress Janou Saint-Denis, who staged La jeune fille et la lune, the second work in the collection Les entrailles (Œuvres, 23–8); she concludes her poem ‘Claude Gauvreau: L’aigle ou le cygne’ with ‘pour moi il est le cygne que l’on entend longtemps mourir sans l’entendre vivre’ (for me he is the swan that one hears dying at length without hearing it live), an allusion to the ‘swan’s song,’ considered the source of poetry (see chapter 4, note 15 above). 13. Borduas in fact did a painting, Poèmes dans la nuit (Gagnon, Paul-Émile Borduas, 268). Death, however, seems far less present in his work than in Gauvreau’s. 14. ‘Je tente l’impossible lumière, quitte à m’enfoncer davantage dans la nuit.’ (Borduas, ‘Communication intime à mes chers amis,’ 119; I attempt the impossible light, willing to fall further into the night.) 15. ‘Nous cherchons une peinture libérée de toute contingence’ (We seek painting freed from all contingincies), Prismes d’yeux, cited in Robert, Art, 67. Although this text was published before Borduas’s manifesto, the manuscript of the latter had been circulating for some time prior to the appearance of either (see Bourassa, 89–90).

Notes to pages 200–5

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16. See especially Silvie Bernier, Du texte, 233–54. See also Buchanan, 5. 17. Duval also characterizes these works as marking ‘a completely new direction,’ Four Decades, 114. 18. In comparing the two painters, Sarrazin states that ‘Alfred Pellan a ouvert les fenêtres du Québec sur l’extérieur et sur un monde inconnu d’expériences esthétiques, et Paul-Émile Borduas sur les visions intérieures et sur le monde du moi dans son effusion cosmique avec la nature.’ (264; Pellan opened the windows of Quebec to the outside and an unknown world of aesthetic experiments, and Borduas to inside visions and the world of the self in its cosmic effusion with nature.) 19. Indeed, in comparing himself to Giguère, Gauvreau stated, ‘Je vois le surréalisme actuel avec l’œil de Borduas, Giguère le voit avec l’œil de Pellan.’ (‘Les affinités,’ 502; I see today’s surrealism with Borduas’s eye, Giguère sees it with Pellan’s eye.) Gauvreau adds that ‘Giguère est le figuratif d’imagination … je suis le non-figuratif d’imagination.’ (510; Giguère is figurative imagination … I’m non-figurative imagination.) No fewer than five of the critical essays in an issue of La barre du jour dedicated to Giguère mention the visuality of his poetry: Saint-Pierre, 6; Aylwin, 12, 19; Stafford, 73, 78; Bertrand, 84; Cimon, 93. Indeed, the dialogue between his own poems and paintings in the volumes Giguère himself illustrated has been amply treated: see, for example, Catherine Morency; Papillon-Boisclair, 199–255; and Silvie Bernier, Du texte, 268–94. 20. Giguère also published his friend Gauvreau’s Sur fil métamorphose (1956), which contains both ‘Les reflets de la nuit’ and ‘Le prophète dans la mer.’ Gauvreau himself wrote a testimony to Giguère in the above volume, ‘Le magicien,’ 142. 21. Brochu notes, for example, Giguère’s propensity for approaching the ‘macrocosmic’ through the microcosmic, and specifically mentions the garden in ‘Roland,’ 304. 22. My sincere thanks to Éditions de l’Hexagone for permission to publish both of Giguère’s poems. 23. Van Schendel, ‘Claude Gauvreau,’ 237; Marcotte, Le temps, 76. In an appendix following his article on Giguère’s L’âge de la parole, a collection of poetry written between 1949 and 1960, Aylwin counts thirty-five references to ‘feu’ and thirteen to ‘cendre,’ and although Malenfant focuses his analysis on Giguère’s ‘Roses et Ronces,’ his intertextual references to ‘le feu’ and ‘le cendre’ (277–81) also confirm my interpretation. 24. Nepveu cites this poem in contrast with the passionate appreciation of the actual landscape in more recent poetry, in particular that of Pierre

334

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

Notes to pages 206–12 Morency, in ‘Figures,’ 20–1. On wordplay in Giguère’s poetry see, for example, Brochu, ‘Roland,’ 302; and Fadin, 24. See Robert, L’art, 186: ‘La tradition de la peinture paysagiste québécoise … trouve un nouveau dynamisme, favoriseé par le retour massif à la figuration depuis le milieu des années ‘60.’ (The tradition of Quebec landscape painting … finds a new dynamism favoured by the massive return to figuration in the mid-sixties.) As witnessed in earlier descriptions by Cartier, Champlain, Garneau, and Chauvreau, among others, the Saint Lawrence is perhaps the most imposing of all icons of Quebec; as Amprimoz states, after listing prominent literary and cultural allusions to the river, including the French version of the national anthem ‘O Canada,’ ‘Throughout Quebec history, the river has been an image of the self: in Lapointe’s poem it becomes the language, the speech of self as well,’ ‘Gatien Lapointe,’ 155. My deep gratitude to Les Éditions du Jour for permission to publish excerpts from Lapointe’s poem. The opening verses are inserted as a heading into a major study on Riopelle, to whom Lapointe is compared here: Bernier et al., Jean-Paul, 58. On the use of the pronoun ‘je’ in conjunction with the definition of ‘l’Amérique’ in Lapointe’s ode and works by Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, see Laroche, 1–17. Lapointe was in Paris when he wrote the poem in 1961 and was well aware of the ancestor (Rimbaud) and the epitome (Éluard) of ‘engaged’ surrealism. Marcotte finds that Lapointe’s use of the present tense creates ‘une atmosphère de Genèse … Tout se passe dans un “temps premier,” une attente, une confiance éperdue qui contiennent l’existence à l’état de promesse.’ (Le temps, 147; an atmosphere of Genesis … Everything happens in an ‘original time,’ an expectation, a passionate confidence that contain existence in a state of promise.) See, for example, Guy Robert’s description of Quebec painting since 1940 as ‘open and dynamic’ (L’art au Québec depuis 1940, 197), quoted in detail on page 297 of this book. Bonenfant contends that ‘Le vœu le plus radical de toute la poésie de Gatien Lapointe est celui de trouver une demeure pour l’homme’ (the most radical wish in all of Lapointe’s poetry is that of finding a home for mankind), and ultimately this ‘lieu habitable’ (inhabitable place) is the poem itself (253). From Érouart, 25; echoed in an interview with Viau, Jean-Paul, 67. Viau also speaks of ‘la nature retransformée’ in Riopelle’s works of the sixties (83). On Riopelle’s attachment to nature see also Piquet, 82–3.

Notes to pages 212–16 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

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See Duval, Four Decades, 108 and Harper, ‘Riopelle’s,’113. Laissaigne, Riopelle, quoted in Théberge et al., 100. Michaud, 10. See also Waldberg, who speaks of ‘a cosmogony’ (47). Riopelle, from a television interview conducted by Fernand Seguin on 28 October 1968, included in Érouart, 80–1. Jacques Michel, 15. In an interview with Constantinidi and Duffy (64), Riopelle also stated: ‘Pour moi, tout est paysage’ (For me everything is landscape), cited in Boulizon, 15, 45. And, as Duval explains: ‘The self-confidence and courage demonstrated by Borduas, Pellan and many of their colleagues symbolized and encouraged the cultural search for self-identity within Quebec society’ (Four Decades, 117). Maugey’s conclusion about Lapointe’s work can well apply to the identitary evolution we have witnessed throughout this chapter: ‘Le poète exhorte l’homme à s’affirmer, à s’accepter et à construire cette terre gigantesque … La première démarche est d’assumer le présent en luimême et en ses contradictions douloureuses pour savoir ensuite ce qui doit être dépassé, transposé et transformé.’ (200; The poet exhorts man to affirm himself, to accept himself, to construct this gigantic land … The first step is to assume the present in its own terms and in terms of its painful contradictions to then learn what must be overcome, transposed, and transformed.) And, after all, as Marcotte proclaims in his conclusion on Giguère, ‘Le poète est celui qui accueille en même temps l’envers et l’endroit, et fait qu’ils se provoquent mutuellement à la transparence.’ (Le temps, 85; The poet is the one who welcomes at once the backside and the front side, and makes them confront each other mutually to the point of transparency.) Baudelaire’s verse is from ‘Correspondances’ (1857); Markham’s is found in ‘Outwitted’ (1913): ‘He drew a circle that shut me out, / Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. / But Love and I had the will to win: / We drew a circle that took him in.’

Chapter 8. From Solititude to Solidarity: La montagne secrète 1. On the title, see Grenier-Francœur, 388. She and Louis Francœur later expand this discussion, 262–4. 2. For Ricard, ‘La montagne secrète, en un mot, c’est déjà l’histoire de Gabrielle Roy elle-même.’ (‘Une rencontre,’ 7; La montagne secrète, in a word, is already the story of Gabrielle Roy herself.) For more on the parallels between Roy and her character Pierre, see Clemente and Clemente,

336

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

Notes to pages 217–22 187–90; Piccione, ‘La Montagne,’ 343–4; and Warwick, The Long Journey, 91–100. The term ‘everyman’ is used by Fiand, 79; and implied by several other critics (see note 20 below). For more on the meaning of the mystique of the North, see Morissonneau, La terre, 55. As Jean Morency contends, ‘Le regard de l’artiste constitue le point central, le vivant foyer de convergence où viennent se résumer toutes les relations existant entre l’Art et le regard.’ (33; The artist’s gaze constitutes the the central point, the living focal point where all the relationships between Art and vision come into play.) See also Babby, 54. Indeed, Pierre’s gesture of ‘planting his oar’ in the water as he sketches the tree, brings us to a highly suggestive analogy drawn by Labbé regarding Richard’s drawing style in her discussion of his handling of trees: ‘De l’art de manier l’aviron … Son art nous le laisse entrevoir dans le rapide influx nerveux qui fend et découpe l’espace en réserves, le geste habile qui laisse ses grands arbres desséchés strier le ciel de ses campements.’ (5; From the art of handling the paddle … His art lets us glimpse in the rapid, nervous influx that hews and cuts up space, the skilful gesture that enables his tall, thin trees to streak the skies of his encampments.) Roy (1975). My thanks to the staff of the University of Toronto Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library for allowing me to view this book. DesGagniers’s description of Richard’s style suits this particular drawing well: ‘un style nerveux, dynamique jusqu’à la violence. Volontiers synthétique: seuls quelques traits et hachures, exécutés avec une extrême sûreté de main, construisent les formes des paysages et les figures qui les peuplent.’ (‘Avant-propos,’ 10; a nervous style, dynamic to the point of violence. Deliberately synthetic: only a few strokes and hatching, executed with extreme sureness of hand, construct the forms of the landscapes and the figures that occupy them.) Caroline Thibault simarly describes Richard’s ‘traits expressionnistes comme son coup de pinceau nerveux et dynamique’ (10; expressionist traits, like his nervous, dynamic brushwork). Similarly, Hugues de Jouvancourt finds the medium of coloured crayons a perfect fit for René Richard, 4. As Morency suggests: ‘l’eau qui coule symbolise le temps qui s’écoule et la rivière qui emporte de plus en plus vite le canotier désemparé et impuissant nous laisse l’image d’un destin aveugle et non maîtrisable.’ (54; the flowing water symbolizes time passing, and the river that ever more quickly carries away the helpless, powerless canoeist leaves us with the image of a blind, uncontrollable destiny.)

Notes to pages 222–31

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10. As Durand puts it, ‘on ressent le geste pictural aux prises avec le vertige de la surface, tandis que les couleurs explorent la peinture en soi’ (8; one feels the pictorial gesture grappling with the vertigo of the canvas’s surface, while the colours explore pure painting). 11. Morency sees several significant dimensions in this passage, which takes nature beyond human vision, towards the incomprehensible (14). 12. Babby examines this passage in detail, reaching the following conclusions: ‘The periphrasis provided by the shift in perspective is doubly charged. It conveys to the reader that Pierre’s incessant peregrinations have not gone unheeded; moreover, it hints at how Pierre’s eccentric artistic acts have been perceived by another culture’ (52). Chapman sees Roy’s ‘techniques of reversals and relativisation’ as an effort to destabilize traditional ways of looking at the North and at the other (‘Beautiful North,’102). 13. The spiritual aspect of this encounter has been widely noted. See especially, Brochu, La Montagne, 540–1; Fiand, 82; Grenier-Francœur, 390; J. Morency, 22–3, 49–50; Piccione, La Montagne, 321; Viselli, 103; Voldeng, 634; and Warwick, The Long Journey, 95. 14. Brochu comments suggestively on the ‘feminization’ of the mountain, not only through the pronoun ‘elle’ but also through allusions to attire (‘ceinture,’ ’joyau,’ etc.), La Montagne, 541; see also Chapman, ‘Beautiful North,’ 99; and Voldeng, 634. Morency notes, as in the example of the sky and the earth at the beginning of part two, the bestowal of the gaze on an aspect of nature, here the lake (21). 15. See, for example, ‘La montagne secrète,’ dessin (drawing) 89.318 (Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec), circa 1961. 16. My thanks to Dr Christian Tschanz for bringing this rare and perceptive article to my attention. 17. On the significance of nature for Roy, see especially Lewis, 164–201; Sirois, ‘De l’idéologie,’ 380–6; and Warwick, The Long Journey, 92–100. 18. For parallel discussions of the significance and recurrence of the tree, see Francœur and Francœur, 293–5; Morency, 24–5; and Amprimoz, ‘L’Homme-Arbre,’ who contends that ‘puisque l’homme et l’arbre partagent la triste condition d’un tronc isolé et l’expression d’une souffrance séculaire, ils peuvent à tout moment être considérés comme symboles l’un de l’autre.’ (168; since man and tree share the same sad condition of an isolated trunk and the expression of secular suffering, they can throughout time be considered as symbols of each other.) 19. From Gagné, Visages, 130; also cited in Chadbourne, 252. According to Lewis, a similar opposition can be found throughout Roy’s works: ‘If Roy’s fictional homes thus far discussed often present the image of an

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20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

Notes to pages 231–41 interior space in contrast to the exterior, it is particularly in La montagne secrète and La rivière sans repos where this opposition is the most intense’ (219). See also Morency and de Finney, 13. Most critics see Roy’s concept of identity as universal rather than national. See, for example, Lewis, 112, 259; as well as Fiand, 79; and Urbas, 52. Warwick puts it nicely: ‘Paris is the lens, looking onto the North which is the artist’s soul’ (The Long Journey, 46). As Roy characterized Richard’s painting, ‘S’il a décrit le froid qui envahit les membres et paralyse la vie, il est aussi le peintre du feu … dans la maigre flamme qui s’en échappe, il y a tout le réconfort, toute la magie du feu.’ (‘Préface,’ 37; If he has depicted the cold that invades the extremities and paralyses life, he is also the painter of fire … in the thin flame that arises, there is all the comfort, all the magic of fire.) Lewis concludes that ‘Solidarity with humanity, therefore, is not necessarily a conflicting state with but often a natural progression from solitude’ (272). Francœur and Francœur deal at some length with Stanislas Lanski’s perception of Pierre’s self-portrait (259–60, 271–2; 279–82). During the course of his career, Richard undertook many self-portraits, including one dated 1934, which is reproduced as a full page in the illustrated version of La montagne secrète, serving as a frontispiece for part two of the novel. In a suggestive analysis of this self-portrait, Grace contends: ‘In this image Richard bears an uncanny likeness to Roy’s description of Pierre Cadorai’s self-portrait. Here, as in the novel, the elongated face and exaggerated ears of the man suggest the resemblance to a deer or caribou’ (223). Several critics have found in Cadorai a homonym for ‘qu’adorer?’ (what to adore) to underscore the theme of the quest; one might also dwell on ‘dorer’ to solder the link with Gédéon, a ‘chercheur d’or’ introduced at the outset, and to emphasize the light brought by the artist to humanity; at any rate, Brochus’s perception of a link between the name Pierre (stone) and the mountain seems particularly insightful (La Montagne, 533). On Richard’s expressionism, see Thibault, 10; and Boulizon, 134. On the ambivalence of the ending, see especially Savic, 154. Grenier-Francœur, 404; see also Sirois, ‘De l’idéologie,’ 382. Indeed, Rea explores parallels between Hébert’s Le premier jardin and Roy’s first novel, Bonheur d’occasion, in ‘Le premier jardin,’ 575–91.

Chapter 9. From Confinement to Constellation: Le premier jardin 1. As Rea puts it, ‘Le premier jardin is a novel of artistic development couched in the frame of a quest novel,’ ‘Eve,’ 124.

Notes to pages 242–62

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2. Pestre de Almeida’s description of the instability and complexity of the narrating voice (47) is echoed in other assessments of the narration including Chapman’s Siting (190). 3. Aresu discusses the role of this and other examples of intertextuality in what he terms the ‘postcolonial novel’: ‘ces renvois textuels … décomposent cependant leur propre contenu pour reconstituer un réseau de rapports gestuels, politiques, ontologiques propres à l’individu et à la scénographie nord-américaine.’ (561; these textual cross references … deconstruct their own content to reconstitute a network of gestural, political, and ontological relationships proper to the North American individual and scenography.) 4. Hébert willingly compares her writing to that of Proust in ‘Poésie,’ 59, 62. 5. Émond discusses the symbolic use of the window in Hébert’s early novels as an opening onto the world, both real and imaginary (362). 6. Numerous critics have analysed the key role of theatre in Le premier jardin, including Aresu (564), Rea (‘Eve,’ 123), and Piccione (Le premier jardin, 89). The interpretations of Marcheix and Mitchell and Côté will be discussed in detail later. 7. The intimate relationship between the personal and collective memory announced in Pestre de Almeida’s title (‘Mémoire collective et mémoire individuelle’) is also underscored by Chapman (Siting, 210) and Lyngaas (59). 8. For a discussion of Hébert’s propensity to gravitate towards transitional spaces, see Berglund, 82–9. 9. The phenomenon of ‘mise en abyme’ is analysed, for example, by Marcheix (333–4), Pestre de Almeida (27), Rea (‘Eve,’122), and Paterson (Anne, 14, 101, to be discussed in detail later). The term comes from Dällenbach. 10. For discussions of the title’s meaning, see Aresu (566); Chapman (Siting, 196); Piccione (‘ Le premier jardin,’ 88); N. Bishop (52); and L. Saint-Martin (‘Les premières mères,’ 673). 11. The significance of Eve is explored by Rea (‘Eve,’ 120–35); as well as Lyngaas (59); Pestre de Almeida (34); and Ferry (23). 12. Among many studies from a feminist perspective are those of Ferry (25) and Guillemette (211). 13. See, for example, Balthazar: ‘le Québec est bel et bien une société pluraliste, multiethnique, laïque et ouverte sur le monde’ (35; Québec is well and truly a society that is pluralist, multiethnic, laic, and open to the world). 14. From Le Devoir (22 Oct. 1960), 9, 12. Quoted in N. Bishop (55). Guillemette discusses the paradoxically irrevocable bond between the seemingly opposing terms ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (213, 219).

340

Notes to pages 262–72

15. The term ‘postmodern subject’ is used, for example, by Paterson in Moments postmodernes and DaSilva (109–18) to designate a pluralistic concept of the subject, which exceeds the notion of a unitary self implied by the singular pronoun ‘je.’ Aresu also uses the term ‘postcolonial’ (555–6) and Guillemette ‘poststructuralist’ (210) in a similar vein; further analyses of the pluralistic subject are those of Chapman (Siting, 211) and Godard (13–44). 16. The Aurore episode is also identified as a transition point by Chapman (Siting, 207) and Pestre de Almeida (50). 17. For a fascinating discussion of the arbre généalogique see Pestre de Almeida, 32–3. 18. Paterson, Anne, 13, 102–3, 135–8, 179–81. The term ‘auto-représentation’ can be traced back at least as far as Ricardou. For ‘metatextuality,’ see Brochu, Anne. 19. From Royer, Écrivains, 196–7, cited in Chapman (Siting, 204n64). 20. See Le Devoir, 15 Dec. 1927, 1, 3. (Found on the Université de Sherbrooke website: ‘Bilan du Siècle: 14 décembre 1927.’ http://www.bilan.usherb.ca/ bilan/pages/evenements/20149.html.) 21. Other possible meanings of Flora’s name are proposed by Chapman (Siting, 191n49) and Rea (‘Eve,’ 127). Chapter 10. ‘My Land(scape) is Winter’ 1. See Robitaille, 27; and Pierre Nadeau, cited by Plouffe, Thomas, and Willis. 2. See Smith, 94. Smith adds, correctly in my view, that this censorship ignores the universal meaning of the poem (94). For more on the historical context, see Lacoursière, Provencher, and Vaugeois, 455–80. 3. On le Nord see the introduction, note 12. For Vigneault, as for many of the other artists in question, the very harshness of winter becomes a means of attaining self-knowledge and self-possession, as Smith contends: ‘La neige, c’est la hantise de se posséder … le Nord … se connaître’ (71; Snow is the desire for self-possession … the North … self-knowledge). 4. Sincere thanks to Les Éditions le Vent Qui Vire for permission to reproduce Vigneault’s poem and his updated punctuation of it. 5. Plouffe, Thomas, and Willis go so far as to see Quebec’s winter, plains, and snow as a metaphor for its cultural isolation. 6. Soucy sums up Vigneault’s work as ‘à la fois individuelle, régionale, nationale et universelle’ (366; at once individual, regional, national, and universal). Indeed, Vigneault himself states, ‘d’une certaine manière, oui, je suis nationaliste. Les nations doivent devenir – hélas! – nationales avant

Notes to pages 272–4

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

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de devenir internationales’ (Gagné, Propos, 107; In a certain way, yes, I am a nationalist. Nations must, alas, become national before becoming international). Unlike Hémon and Savard (chapter six), Vigneault uses the term ‘race’ to designate differences in colour. In a conference at the Université de Montréal entitled ‘Les humains sont de ma race’ (16 Feb. 1966), he linked the situation of the Amerindian in Quebec and the black in Alabama to that of humanity in general and stated rhetorically to all, taking from Mon pays, that ‘ma maison, c’est votre maison.’ Cited in Robitaille, 51; and Gagné, Propos, 94. Vigneault, ‘J’ai un pays’ from the original La Manikoutai album (1967). Vigneault’s statement is remarkably close to Giguère’s assertion in ‘Paysage dépaysé’ that ‘le paysage était à refaire’ (the landscape had to be redone) (chapter seven). For Vigneault, the song further compensates for the colonization endured by the Quebec nation: ‘C’est nous qui sommes colonisés par toutes espèces de colonialismes. Culturellement par la France … économiquement par les États-Unis, juridiquement et constitutionnellement par l’Angleterre … Le colonialisme culturel n’est cependant pas établi de façon aussi systématique que le colonialisme économique et politique … La chanson québécoise, à cause de sa jeunesse, n’est heureusement pas colonialisée.’ (Gagné, Propos, 107; We are colonized by all manner of colonialisms. Culturally by France … economically by the United States … juridically and constitutionally by England. Cultural colonialism is not, however, established as systematically as economic and political colonialism … happily, because of its youth, the Quebecois song is not colonized.) According to Brulotte, Lemieux’s winterscapes are a ‘paraphrase’ of Vigneault’s verse ‘mon pays, c’est l’hiver’ (125). See Robert Bernier, Un siècle, 102. May (1877–1971) studied with William Brymner, exhibited with the Group of Seven, and was a founding member of the Beaver Hall Group and later the Canadian Group of Painters. As Walters notes of the Beaver Hall Group, ‘many embraced the Quebec francophone tradition that landscapes include signs of habitation: the picture could be devoid of man himself, but not of his tools, buildings, or other imprints of civilization,’ 16. The church is at the corner of Sherbrooke and Atwater Streets; May’s studio, from 1914–18, was on rue Sainte-Catherine near Mackay. My thanks to the staff of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal for enabling me to consult the dossier for the painting.

342

Notes to pages 275–82

14. See Prakash, 131. Duval also includes both May and Robinson among ‘Canadian Impressionists,’ albeit in their earlier periods, Canadian Impressionists, 104–5, 130–1. 15. Robinson had, in fact, travelled to Brittany in 1911 with his friend A.Y. Jackson, a founding member of the Group of Seven, and was greatly influenced by Clarence Gagnon, who also used the cloisonné effect. 16. In fact, the Canadiens and the Maple Leafs were bitter but equal rivals, the Leafs having won the Stanley Cup three straight times in the late forties. In his recent biography/autobiography, Our Life with the Rocket, Carrier discusses this ‘historical error’ (156), noting that he was as convinced of its truth at the time of writing the story as he had been in his youth. Such is the power of the ‘selective memory’; see, in this regard, McHugh, 268–73. 17. For more on the conservative Duplessis era, see the beginning of chapter seven. 18. See Carrier, Our Life with the Rocket, 80. 19. As prime minister of Canada from 1968–79 and 1980–4, Pierre-Elliot Trudeau supported passage of the first Loi sur les langues officielles (Official Languages Act) in 1969, the year prior to the writing of Le chandail. See Lacoursière, Provencher, and Vaugeois, 462–4. Carrier himself saw this measure in an entirely positive light: ‘In 1969, a Royal Commission on Bilingualism was created, and it laid the foundation of what became our policy of multiculturalism: the concept of “one people, two official languages, many cultures,” bound together by tolerance, and respectful of differences,’ ‘Bringing the Rainbow,’ 3. 20. As Carrier reveals, from the time of his youth, ‘la seule chose qui m’ait vraiment intéressé, et c’est tout à fait naïf de le dire, c’est l’écriture’ (‘De Sainte-Justine,’ 268; the only thing that really interested me, and it’s really naive to say so, is writing); see also ‘Comment,’ 270. 21. As Carrier states clearly, ‘Je suis d’accord avec cette émancipation du jeune Québécois à condition que cette émancipation n’amène pas une autre destruction.’ (‘De Sainte-Justine,’ 270; I agree with this emancipation of the young Quebecois with the condition that this emancipation not bring other destruction.) 22. Again, Carrier’s views on multiculturalism are clear: ‘This policy of multiculturalism is not just about promoting the future. We cannot promote the future if we don’t understand the past. We cannot promote higher values if we don’t acknowledge that in the past, we sinned against tolerance,’ ‘Bringing the Rainbow,’ 6.

Notes to pages 282–4

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23. Carrier describes his early writing as a reaction against the conservatism of the Duplessis era, ‘cette nuit du Québec’ (‘Comment,’ 271; this darkness of Quebec). 24. A problem with irony is that its message, since unstated in the text, lies elsewhere. Fortunately, Carrier leads us there in interviews and other texts, which, by their intertextuality, inform a story as short and terse as Le chandail. A primary intertext for Le chandail, since it also deals with Maurice Richard and his era is Our Life with the Rocket, which is at once a biography of Richard and an autobiography of Carrier’s growing up in Richard’s era and aura. As Carrier remembers it of the late-war and post-war period, the effect of Richard and the Canadiens was already multicultural, not solely French-Canadian: ‘Workers and bosses, English and French, Jews and Gentiles, sons of ancestors and sons of immigrants: with one voice, the population of Quebec cheers the French Canadian whom their children are imitating in their games. With his muscles strained as taut as bowstrings, Maurice Richard lays claim to the territory of hockey. He occupies it with authority. And through this ritual, French Canadians are regaining confidence in themselves, in their future. Each of them feels a little less defeated, a little less humiliated, a little more strong’ (71). Moreover, despite the static views of some politicians, educators, and priests, Carrier notes that the province of Quebec is changing: ‘“Nothing changes in the land of Quebec,” we read in Maria Chapdelaine, a 1914 novel that’s known to everyone who has gone to school. The quotation is no longer true. The province of Quebec has entered a new season. Immigration is a constant topic of discussion’ (141). When the Liberal Party triumphs in 1959, Carrier salutes the openness proclaimed by its leaders (288). The following year Maurice Richard retires, but the Quiet Revolution begins, a period whose embracing of change is, I contend, already as implicit in Le chandail as it is explicit in Carrier’s other words and works. 25. See Carrier, ‘Comment,’ 271; and ‘De Sainte-Justine,’ 269. 26. The pochade, a pocket-size oil painting, is often a mere study for a larger work; for Côté, however, it’s a finished work fit for publication, as in Babinska’s Bruno Côté, in which the present example appears (62). My sincere thanks to Vincent Fortier for the image and authorization to print it. 27. Far less than the 25 per cent recommended by the painter Albert Rousseau: ‘La couleur est belle … en autant qu’il y a soixante-quinze pour cent de gris dans un tableau. Jamais vous ne pouvez faire vibrer une

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28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

Notes to pages 285–96 couleur parmi trente couleurs qui vibrent.’ (Blouin, 40; Colour is beautiful … to the degree that seventy-five percent of the painting is grey. You can never make a colour vibrate in the midst of thirty other vibrating colours.) Babinska alludes to Côté’s ‘pinceau énergique’ (19; energetic brush) and ‘coups de pinceau nerveux’ (38; nervous brushwork). This effect is not simply a result of the pochade medium; it also characterizes his larger works and matches the artist’s determination to capture the movement and change of nature, as Marie-Josée Thibault has noted of his work: ‘Les forces et les contrastes des paysages canadiens explosent sur ses toiles.’ (6; The forces and contrasts of the Canadian landscape explode on his canvasses.) Brulotte cites the role of winter’s empty space in creating a sense of austerity in Lemieux’s painting (126). ‘Le terme prismatique est celui que j’ai donné à ce style … car c’est l’expression de ma vision à travers un prisme.’ (The term prismatic is the one I gave to this style … since it’s the expression of my vision through a prism.) From an email exchange with the painter in December, 2010. In optics, the boundary of a prismatic surface is termed the ‘directrix’ and the parallel lines ‘generators,’ an interesting way to look at the function of the shoreline and vertical lines here. In fact, Leclerc’s first painting in Filion’s L’île depicts an impossible view with the village of Saint-Michel-de Bellechasse, then the île d’Orléans, superimposed onto Quebec City in the far ground, which represents a visual synthesis of three distinct aspects of Leclerc’s life. See Filion, 22–3, and his comments, 14–15. Piccione detects a thematic unity involving the notion of misunderstanding, ‘Aller simple,’ 191–6, while Fisher finds a common feeling of spatial dislocation, ‘délocalisation,’ 310. As Proulx puts it in a revealing interview, ‘L’Amérique, pour moi, c’est d’abord un espace’ (Santoro, McPherson, and Bascom, 624; America for me is first of all a space). Raoul reads this scene differently, seeing whiteness as ‘equated with the emptiness of death,’ ‘Immigration,’ 169. As Proulx states regarding identity, ‘le français est peut-être ce qui constitue la constante, le point central’ (Santoro, McPherson, and Bascom, 626; the French language is perhaps what constitutes the constant, the central point). Soron further notes the central position of Mount Royal itself, the presentation of the city, and the identitary quest that run through the otherwise fragmented stories in ‘Révolution,’115–24.

Notes to pages 296–303

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38. Cusson provides an excellent reading of this novella through a fascinating analogy between writing, reading, and game-playing, all based on knowing oneself through the other, a notion that could well be applied to multiculturalism as well. 39. Proulx’s position on change is clear: ‘Il faut accepter d’être dans le mouvement, la transformation. C’est ça, la liberté.’ (Santoro, McPherson, and Bascom, 625, see also 629; We must accept being in movement, transformation. That’s what freedom is.) 40. Proulx’s stand on multiculturalism is evident throughout her recent interview, as in ‘chez nous, il y a cette influence des différentes cultures’ (Santoro, McPherson, and Bascom, 625; for us, there is this influence of different cultures), which she identifies as one of the most positive developments in modern-day Montreal, praised in a recent book illustrated by Benoît Chalifour’s photos. After identifying the different ethnic neighbourhoods, Proulx concludes that ‘Montréal, fidèle à lui-même, n’assemble pas le puzzle. Il laisse exister côte à côte ses ingrédients désaccordés, faisant de l’infinitude une fin en soi.’ (Montréal, 14; Montreal, faithful to itself, doesn’t assemble the puzzle. It leaves its disparate ingredients side by side, making diversity an end in itself.) Indeed, Pierre L’Hérault reads the dedications to various authors in the stories as an acknowledgment that immigrant writing has contributed to the development of Quebec litterature (50). 41. See also Aquin, 61, 79. Conclusion: From Imagery to Identity 1. Abbreviations are generally used here for titles of texts, and artists’ names are usually given instead of painting titles; La montagne thus refers to Roy’s novel, not to Riopelle’s painting. 2. In the course of this book, the nature/culture dyad appears directly in quotes by Bouchard, Boulizon, Bureau, de Certeau, Demerson, Dumont, F.-M. Gagnon, Guillemette, Marin, Mitchell, Morissonneau, Nepveu, Perron, Schama, and Sicotte. 3. The theme of paradise lost, already a cliché in Voltaire’s Candide, intensifes in the Romantic period (e.g., Chateaubriand’s Atala, René; Hugo’s ‘Tristesse d’Olympio’) and culminates in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. 4. See Carrier’s counter-comment on this quote in chapter 10, note 24. 5. As in the Bildungsromans of Balzac, Stendhal, and even Flaubert, but the lessons about society are invariably negative.

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Notes to pages 308–9

6. As Fernand Dumont puts it in his discussion of a second sense of culture, ‘pour se donner une histoire, la conscience doit croire à une histoire qui ne dépendrait pas que d’elle seule’ (Le Lieu, 239; to create a history, consciousness must believe in a history that would not depend on itself alone). 7. Hébert in Royer, ‘Interview,’ 17. Similarly, Dumont describes culture as ‘un projet sans cesse compromis’ (Le Lieu, 25; a project always compromised), and Gabrielle Roy states that ‘fundamentally what we hope is to get it all down in one book, or in one picture, or in one song, but of course always something is left out. That’s why we start again’ (in Cameron, 144).

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Index

Acadia/Acadian, 10, 24, 143–4, 254–5, 323n9 Agriculture, 4, 67, 108, 299–300, 321n4; and Cartier, 16; and Champlain, 24; and Chauveau, 91, 94; and Conan, 113; and GérinLajoie, 98, 102, 104; and Hémon, 155–6; and Lacombe, 67, 75; and Lescarbot, 24; and Savard, 175 Allard, Jacques, 21, 323n15, 324n22 Amerindian nations: Algonquin, 25, 50, 55, 57–8; Eskimo, 222, 227; Huron, 25, 29, 31, 35–6, 45, 52, 317n24; Iroquois, 42, 45, 50, 58, 137–8; Montagnais, 25; Ottawa, 42–4 Amerindians, 43, 45, 49, 55; and Cartier, 20–1; and Champlain, 24–5; and Garneau, 35; and identity, 38, 45, 56–7, 59–60, 64, 306–7; and nomadism, 32; and sign-reading, 20, 24, 35; as spectre, 54, 137, 319n11, 325n6

Amprimoz, Alexandre, 323n14, 324n17, 324n20, 334n26, 337n18 Andrès, Bernard, 72–3, 320n2 Anne of Austria (dowager Queen of France), 29 Anne, Saint, 58, 71 approaches (critical): feminist, 127, 319n12, 323n10, 324n18, 339n12; iconographic, 195; psychological, 195, 323n10; structural, 195; of this book, 4 Aresu, Bernard, 339n3, n6, n10, 340n15 Babinska, Roxanne, 284–5, 344n28 Baie-Saint-Paul, 151–2, 249, 275–7, 284 Balthazar, Louis, 272, 306, 339n13 Baudelaire, Charles, 168, 215, 243 Beaudoin, Réjean, 102, 108, 306 Beaudry, Louise, 128–9, 324n26 Beaugrand, Honoré: La chasse-galerie, 59–65

Only critics whose work is discussed in detail or in more than one context are included here; other critics, to whom I am also indebted, can usually be located by matching the title in the works cited with the relevant chapter.

374

Index

Beaulieu, Alain, 59, 71, 95, 317n3, 320n3, 321n5 beauty: and culture, 16; and nature, 32; and nature/culture, 154; and utility, 15–16, 22 Beckett, Samuel, 242, 267–8 Belœil Mountain, 133–8 Berg, William J., 312n10, 317n2, 325n3, n7 Bergeron, Christian: Village en hiver (plate 15), 286–7 Bernier, Robert, 149, 200–1, 206, 212, 239, 341n11 Bernier, Silvie, 160, 313n13, 326–7n5, 327n7, n8, 333n16, n19 Bigot, intendant, 54–5, 319n11 bilingualism, 282, 342n19 Biron, Michel, 131, 155, 317n2, 324n17, 324n1; on journalism, 321n6; on reconquest, 324n17 Boivin, Aurélien, 156, 174, 183, 188, 329n21 Borduas, Paul-Émile, 191, 195, 199, 213–16; Les arbres dans la nuit, 193–6; Refus Global, 190–3 Boucher de Boucherville, PierreGeorges: Louise Chawinikisique, 48–52 Boulianne, Bruno, 11 Boulizon, Guy, 161, 285–6, 326n16, 338n27 Bourassa, André, 197, 332n9, n15 Bourbonnais, Nicole, 324n16, n17, n23 British, 66, 75, 103, 105, 144, 174 Brochu, André: on Conan, 323n12, 324n19; on Giguere, 333n21, 333–4n24; on Roy, 217, 337n13, n14, 338n26; on Savard 329n24, 330n31

Brulotte, Gaëton, 327n10, n12, 341n10, 344n29 Brymner, William, 249, 341n11; Ils aimaient à lire, 110–11 Buchanan, Donald W., 333n16 Bureau, Luc, 4–5, 14–15, 24, 28, 31, 172–3, 296, 311n2, 314n8, 322n3 Cadieux, Jean, 56–60 Canadianness, 269 Canadien, Le (newspaper), 76, 321n6 canoe, 59, 64 Cap-aux-Corbeaux, 152, 284 Carani, Marie, 161 Carile, Paolo, 23, 313n2, 314n10 Carr, Thomas, 122, 323n10, n12, 328n17 Carrier, Roch: Le chandail de hockey, 277–84; Our Life with the Rocket, 342n18, 343n24 Cartier, Jacques: and Champlain, 21, 28–9, 315n12; and Conan, 114; and Garneau, 32–3; and Marie-Victorin, 325n5; Voyages au Canada, 15–21 Casgrain, Henri-Raymond, 56 Césaire, Aimé, 297 Cézanne, Paul, 80, 212, 227, 231 Chamberland, Paul, 205–6, 211 Champlain, Samuel de: and Cartier, 21, 28–9, 312n12; L’habitation de Québec (engraving), 26–7; Voyages en Nouvelle-France, 21–31 Chapman, Rosemary, 156, 168, 320n1, 326n3, 328n18, 337n12, n14; on Hébert, 339n2, n7, n10, 340n15, n16, n21 Charlevoix (region of Quebec), 23, 151, 249, 284, Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de, 34, 316n21, 318n5

Index Chateaubriand, François-René de, 32, 34, 42, 54, 316n18; and Atala, 49, 52, 86, 120, 315n16, 345n3 Chauveau, Pierre-Joseph-Olivier, 84, 317n24; Charles Guérin, 78–96 Chen, Ying, 291 church: building, 3, 91, 107, 143, 156–8, 192; institution, 75, 97, 199, 278, 282, 315n13 city, 75–6, 91–4, 102, 246–7, 288–9, 301 civilization, 75, 191. See also culture Claudel, Paul, 332n9 colonization, 14, 16, 341n9; agricultural, 91, 95, 102, 156, 165 colour, 136, 290, 297–8, 331n6, 337n10; expressed by nominal form, 81, 136, 167, 221 commemoration, 38–9, 47–8. See also memory, sites of composition, 10, 22, 79; in literature, 69, 81, 101, 164, 167, 329n23; in painting, 145, 149, 174, 226, 247, 285–6 Conan, Laure (Félicité Angers), 200; Angéline de Montbrun, 110–26; Paysage de Neuville, 126–8 Confederation, Canadian (1867), 97 contradiction (and identity), 7, 131, 194, 215, 297, 335n39 Conquest, the (1759), 31, 37, 95, 247, 251, 302; and reconquest, 322n5 Côté, Bruno: Rang Cap-aux-Corbeaux (plate 14), 284–6 Cotnam, Jacques, 317n2, 322n10, 328n19 coureur de bois, 168, 216, 302 creativity, 199, 229, 238 cross, 19–20, 43–4, 47, 58, 300 Cullen, Maurice, 249, 269; Près des Éboulements, 147–9

375

culture: and art, 132; definition of, 4–6, 311n2, n3; icons of, 300; and identity, 306; and memory, 6; and nature, 3–4, 14–15, 42, 108, 175, 220 Davies, Thomas: View of Montmorency Falls (plate 2), 34 deCerteau, Michel, 311n3, 312n8 deciphering/decoding. See sign-reading Demers, Patricia, 161, 328n13, n16 DesGagniers, Jean, 336n7 DesMarais, Émile, 328n17 deVaucher, Anne, 290, 297 dialectics/dialectical, 113, 123, 215, 297, 311n3 discourse, 10, 51, 88, 225 diversity, cultural (heterogeneity), 294–7, 307–8, 312n40. See also variety Donnacona, 20 Dumont, Fernand, 4, 76, 125, 311n4, 312n9, 346n6, n7; Le lieu, 6–8, 192, 272, 283, 302–3 Dumont, François, 131, 155, 317n2, 324n17, 324n1; on journalism, 321n6; on reconquest, 324n17 Duplessis, Maurice, 190–1, 195, 297 Duquette, Jean, 92–3, 95, 321n10, 322n13, 343n23 Durham, Lord, 32, 56, 315–16n17, 317n24, 320n4 Duval, Paul, 325n3, n8, 335n33, n38, 342n14 Eastern Cantons, 98 Eden/edenic, 14, 23, 31, 32, 72, 256, 315n16 Elgin, Lord, 97 Ellenwood, Ray, 331n7, n8, 332n10 Éluard, Paul, 207

376

Index

Éthier-Blais, 324n42 ethnic group. See diversity, cultural; race Falardeau, Jean-Charles, 322n13, n5, 326n2 Farm(ing). See agriculture father (figure), 92, 98, 113, 121, 301; loss of, 86 Findlay, L.M., 235n6, 317n24, 319n11 fire: symbolism of, 183, 204–5, 272, 293, 338n22 Flaubert, Gustave, 86, 345n5 forest: as icon, 24, 75, 197, 231, 299 French: heritage of, 8, 13–14, 19, 25, 29, 31 François I (king), 21 Fréchette, Louis, 312n7 freedom (liberty), 59, 174, 188–9, 191, 203–7, 228 French colonial period (1534–1759), 6, 37, 45, 97, 113, 317n3 Frontenac, Louis de Buade de (governor of New France), 256 fur trade, 31, 48, 70–1 Gagné, Marc, 312n11 Gagnon, Clarence, 249, 269, 342n15; L’église de Péribonka, 159–61; Evening on the North Shore (plate 1), 11; La croix de chemin en hiver, 151 Gagnon, François-Marc, 31, 48, 314n5, 315n13, 324n25, 326n14; and Lacroix, 315n13; and Petel, 17–19; and Young, 191, 194, 331n5 garden: as icon, 10, 25, 104–5, 115–18, 200–3, 270 Garneau, François-Xavier: and Cartier, 32–3; and Champlain, 33;

and Conan, 124; Histoire du Canada, 31–4; Le dernier Huron, 35–6 Gasbaronne, Lisa, 311n4, 315n17, 323n12 Gaspé, Philippe-Aubert de (père), 95 Gastaldi, Jacopo: La terra della Hochelaga, 17–19, 290 Gatineau River, 62 Gauvreau, Claude, 196, 199, 205, 330n2, 331n5, 333n20; Les reflets de la nuit, 195–200 Gérin-Lajoie, Antoine, Jean Rivard, 97–108 Giguère, Roland, 203, 205, 213; Histoire naturelle, 204–5; L’ombre des jardins, 203–4; Paysage dépaysé, 205 Grace, Sherrill, 338n25 Grandbois, Alain, 200 Grandpré, Pierre de, 13, 330–1n3 Green, Mary Jean, 323n13, 324n18, n25 Group of Seven, 132, 154, 341n12, 342n15 Guérin, Eugénie de, 124 habitant/habitante, 71, 78 habitat/habitability, 23, 26 Harper, J. Russell, 325n11, 335n33 Hébert, Anne, 253, 327n11, n12; Le premier jardin, 9–10, 25, 241–68 Hébert, Louis, 25, 253, 256 Heidenreich, Rosmarin, 323n14, 324n17, n21 Hémon, Louis: Maria Chapdelaine, 155–74, 175, 188, 269, 343n24 Henri IV (king), 29 Hill, Charles, 325n10 Hochelaga. See Montreal hockey, 271–84, 343n24 home/homestead, 67, 80, 101–2, 176, 269, 271–2

Index Hughes, Langston, 334n28 Hugo, Victor, 258, 345n3 Huron, Lake, 39, 42, 57 hybridity, 42, 252 icon(s), 11, 59, 105, 192, 200, 283 identity, 78, 92, 209–10, 214–15, 297, 306–7; construction of, 76, 96, 207, 295; contradiction in, 8, 76, 94, 172, 262; definition of, 7–8; and landscape, 11, 63–4, 67–8, 78, 170, 261–2; and memory, 247, 303, 311n4; and modernity, 214–15; multiplicity in, 233, 259–62, 262; personal and national, 66, 113, 171–2, 207, 273, 278; quest for, 11, 223, 241; as struggle, 66, 97, 161, 208, 308–9 ideology, 7, 281, 312n12 île aux Coudres, 140–3, 284 île aux Grues, 108 île d’Orléans, 16, 109, 257, 289, 344n32 île du Grand Calumet, 57 illustration (of texts), 11, 313n13 imagery (images), 6–7, 140, 214, 267, 331n7 immigrant/immigration, 260, 294, 301, 306, 343n24, 345n40 impasto, 146, 149, 226, 265, 289, 325n11. See also texture Impressionism/Impressionist, 131–52, 165, 245, 300, 302, 325n11 Indian. See Amerindian international(ism), 208–9, 231, 272, 282, 296, 340–1n6. See also multicultural(ism); universal(ity) intertextuality, 304, 333n23, 339n3, 343n24 intratextuality, 123, 188, 304, 339n9

377

irony, 250, 283, 343n24 Jackson, A.Y., 342n15 journalism, 66, 76 Julien, Henri: La Chasse-galerie, 64–5 Klinkhoff, Walter, 277 Krieghoff, Cornelius: Québec vu de la pointe de Lévy (plate 4), 93–4 Kritzman, Lawrence, 38 La France apportant la foi aux Hurons de la Nouvelle-France, 29 Lacombe, Patrice: La terre paternelle, 67–76 Lacoursière, Jacques, 315n15, 315–16n17, 317n1, 322n1, 340n2 Lacroix, Laurier, 31, 145, 324n27, 326n15 Laferrière, Dany, 293 land: clearing of (défrichement), 91, 98, 164, 280; and heritage, 92, 274; loss of, 67, 86, 301 Landry, Pierre, 146–7, 320n16 landscape, 3–6, 11–12, 308–9, 311n1, 313n14, and identity, 11, 63–4, 67–8, 170, 261–2; as literary device, 79, 85; and memory, 49, 87; North American, 132; reconfiguration of, 205, 211, 214 language, 200, 206–11 Lapointe, Gatien: Ode au SaintLaurent, 206–11 Lassaigne, Jacques, 327n8, n12 Laval, François de (Monseigneur), 254 Leclerc, Raynald, 249, 265; Au coeur du Vieux Québec, 245, 247; Fleuron néo-gothique. La porte Saint-Louis, 246–8; Regard d’un parc traquille.

378

Index

Le parc Montmorency, 254–6; S’éclate la lumière. La rue SainteAnne (plate 13); Vue du ciel (Québec) (plate 16), 287–90 Leduc, Ozias, 194, 195, 200; Le cumulus bleu (plate 5), 128–30 Lefebvre, Germain, 200, 202 Légaré, Joseph, 36, 84; Le Canadien, 76–8; Martyre de Françoise BrunonGonannhatenha, 45–7; Paysage au monument à Wolfe (plate 3), 47–8 LeHuenen, Roland, 19, 314n4 Lemieux, Jean Paul, 249, 173, 327n12; L’église de Péribonka, 161–2 Lemieux, Pierre-H., 329n21, 330n31, n33 Lemire, Maurice, 55–6, 318n4, n6, 321n12 Lescarbot, Marc, 24 Létourneau, Jocelyn, 7–8, 131, 174, 283, 302, 307 Lévis, François-Gaston de, 89, 113 Lewis, Paula, 337n17, 338n23 liberation, 192–3, 200, 214–15, 228, 332n11 liberty. See freedom light, 62–3, 90–1, 203–5, 245, 288–9, 295–6 L’Iroquoise, 38–45 literature: and identity, 56; and painting, 8–9, 115, 133, 203, 226, 311n10; properties of, 9–10 Louis XIV (king), 29, 143, 256 Luc, Brother, 29, 314n13 Mailhot, Laurent, 206, 331n6 Major, Robert, 105–6, 108, 322n4, n6 Malcolm X, 293 mapping/maps, 3, 25, 251, 259, 314n8

Marcotte, Gilles, 35–6, 204, 215, 333n23, 334n29, 335n39 Marie de l’Incarnation (mother), 124 Marie-Victorin, Brother (Conrad Kirouac): Croquis Laurentiens, 133–45 Markham, Edwin, 215 Maugey, Axel, 200, 205, 335n39 May, Mabel (Henrietta): Flocons. Fenêtre de l’atelier, 274–5 McGregor, John, 33–4 McKay, Marylin, 313n15, 314n5, n8, 317n22, 321n4, n7 memorial, 47–8, 54, 55, 57 memory: and identity, 247, 303, 311n4; process of, 55, 87, 120; site of, 28, 38, 89, 171, 232–3. See also commemoration; memorial Mesnard, Father, 38–45, 318n5 metaphor, 17, 99, 178, 231, 265, 274; and metonymy, 178; painterly, 81; spatial, 191; visual, 87, 139, 198, 246, 274; and writing, 110, 295, 298 Micone, Marco, 292 Miron, Gaston, 206 mise en abyme, 123, 188, 304, 339n9. See also intratextuality; self-representation missionary, 45, 64, 157, 214, 228 Mitchell, W.J.T., 7, 315n13 modernity, 175, 190, 214–15, 275 Monet, Claude, 88, 227, 325n11 Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondaat, baron de), 291 Montmorency Falls, 22, 34–5, 52 Montreal, city of, 17–19, 23, 63–4, 72, 274, 290–6 Morency, Jean, 336n4, n9, 337n11, n13, n14, n18, 338n19 Morency, Pierre, 333–4n24 Morisset, Gérard, 26

Index Morissonneau, Christian, 312n5, 312–13n12, 314n7, 321n11, 322n4, 336n3 Morrice, James Wilson: Maison de ferme québécoise, 149–51 mother(hood), 257–9 mountain: as icon, 176, 185–7, 213–14, 223–5, 300 multicultural(ism) (multiethnic), 259–60, 272, 282, 296, 322–3n8, 345n40. See also international(ism) myth/mythology, 10, 15, 39, 113, 181, 217. See also Eden/edenic Nadeau, Michel, 147, 201 Namer, Gérard, 38, 48, 188, 302 names/naming, 19, 208–11, 260–1, 314n7 Nardout-Lafarge, Élisabeth, 131, 155, 317n2, 324n17, 324n1; on journalism, 321n6; on reconquest, 324n17 narration/narrator, 38, 50, 56, 106, 112, 242 nationalism, 37, 133, 138, 153, 277 nature, 88, 299–300, 305; and culture, 42, 110, 114, 154, 192, 235–6; danger of, 168, 269–70; definition of, 3–4, 311n2; domination over, 24, 31, 99; lure of, 165; reconfiguration of, 212; as reflection of inner life, 110, 128; and supernatural, 123 Nelligan, Émile, 272 Nepveu, Pierre, 5, 126, 311n1, 333–4n24 Nipissing, Lake, 50 nomadism, 307, 321n5 Nora, Pierre, 38 North, 11; and French-Canadian identity, 231, 269, 274, 300, 312–13n12, 340n3 North West Company, 70–1

379

novel, 66, 78, 110, 112, 156, 320n1 novella, 290 Ostiguy, Jean-René, 324n27, 331n5 Ottawa River, 50, 67 Ouellet, Réal, 59, 71, 95, 317n3, 320n3, 321n5; on Cartier, 17, 313n3, 316n21 painting, 10–11; and literature, 8–9, 115, 133, 203, 226, 311n10 Papineau, Amédée: Caroline, 52–6 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 55 paradise: lost, 94, 279, 301–2; regained, 94–6, 98–9, 116, 164, 168. See also Eden/edenic Paris, 232, 338n21 Paterson, Janet, 339n9, 340n15, n18 patriots’ rebellions (1837–8): 37, 48, 72–3, 98, 302, 315–16n17 Pellan, Alfred, 200, 203, 213; Jardin vert (plate 9), 200–3 Pelletier, Urgel, 189, 227, 330n30 Perron, Paul, 20–1, 76, 171–2, 314n7, 320n1, 328n16 personification, 51, 68, 115, 142, 207, 225 Pestre de Ameida, Liliane, 339n2, n7, n9, n11, 340n16, n17 Peters, Jeffrey, 25, 29, 315n12 Piccione, Marie-Lyne, 336n2, 337n13, 339n6, 344n33 Pilot, Robert W., 149 Pirandello, Luigi, 268 place, 205, 292; and Champain, 31; definition of, 5–6, 312n8; and space, 3–6, 41, 169 Plamondon, Antoine, 36, 317n24, 319n11 poet/poetry, 203, 205, 273, 323n15, 332n11, n12, 335n39

380

Index

Pointe-Lévis, 89, 93 Ponge, Francis, 134 Porter, John R., 45, 154, 318n7, 326n16 postmodernism (postcolonialism, post-structuralism), 262, 340n15 Prioul, Didier, 47–8, 93, 318n7, 321n7 Prisme d’yeux, 200, 332n15 Proulx, Monique: Les aurores montréales, 290–8 Proust, Marcel, 88, 244, 251, 345n3 Provencher, Jean, 315n15, 315–16n17, 317n1, 322n1, 340n2 quarrel of traditionalists and exotics, 131 Quebec City, 54; and Cartier, 17; and Champlain, 22; and Chauveau, 89–90; and Garneau, 32–3; and Hébert, 243, 247; and Krieghoff, 94; and Lapointe, 210; and Leclerc, 287–90 quest, 11, 97, 153–4, 216–18, 241, 295 Quiet Revolution, 206, 215, 241, 257, 269, 281–3 race, 105, 158, 171, 175–6, 272, 293–4. See also Amerindian; multicultural(ism) Racine, Jean, 250 Raoul, Valérie, 323n5, 324n24, 344n35 Rea, Annabelle, 338n29, n1, 339n6, n9, n11, 340n2 reader/reading, 124, 207, 240, 250, 282 reconquest, 322n5 Reid, Dennis, 31, 34, 93–4, 133, 161, 191 relativity, 79, 88, 112, 291–4, 337n12

religion, 21, 30–1, 52, 156; opposition to, 191 Rembrandt (Harmenszoon van Rijn), 236 Renaissance, 14–15, 19, 24, 256, 313n2, 314n6 Renaud, André, 66, 328–9n20, 329n21 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 229 revelation, 169–70, 235, 258, 263, 303 Ricard, François, 61, 178, 229, 319n13, n14, 329n21, n23, n29, 330n32 Richard, Maurice, 278–80, 282, 343n24 Richard, René, 189, 235–6, 249; Campement, 179; Homme adossé à un arbre, 218; La montagne de mes rêves (plate 12), 239–40; La montagne secrète (plate 11), 226–7; Le campement, 234–5; Les draveurs, 181; Territoire de Menaud (plate 7), 177; and Roy, 179, 229, 338n22 Richelieu River (rivière des Iroquois), 22, 136 Rimbaud, Arthur, 207 Riopelle, Jean-Paul, 191; La montagne (plate 10), 211–14 river: as icon, 178, 206, 252, 300 Robert, Guy, 161, 173, 177, 297, 331n5, 334n25 Robert, Lucie, 112 Robidoux, Réjean, 66, 328–9n20, 329n21 Robinson, Albert Henry: Vue de Baie-Saint-Paul en hiver, 274–7 role-playing. See theatre Rollet, Marie, 253–4, 256 Romanticism/Romantic, 42, 87–8, 94, 315n16, 345n3 Rousseau, Albert, 343–4n27

Index Rousseau, Guildo, 318n4, 318–19n7 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 31 Roy, Camille, 132 Roy, Fernand, 125 Roy, Gabrielle, 249, 274, 346n7; La montagne secrète, 216–40; and Richard, René, 179, 229, 378n22 Sagard, Gabriel, 314n9 Saguenay (region of Quebec), 23, 34 Saint Bruno, Lake, 138–9 Saint-Laurent, Louis Stephan, 256 Saint Lawrence River, 17, 81–3, 147, 206, 334n26 Saint Lawrence, valley of, 16, 31, 61, 78, 98, 156 Saint-Martin, Fernande, 214 Saint-Martin, Lori, 123, 323n10, 324n18 Savard, Félix-Antoine, 249; Menaud, maître-draveur, 174–89 sea: symbolism of, 118–20 seasons: changes of, 132, 136, 139, 145, 164, 228; winter, 269, 300 seigneurial system, 31, 101, 315n15 self. See identity self-determination, 106, 215, 308 self-representation, 8, 215, 265, 307–8, 312n9, 346n6, n7 Servais-Maquoi, 67, 320n2, 322n5 Shakespeare, 110, 230, 245, 258 short story, 37, 64, 281 Sicotte, Hélène, 152–4, 326n12, n13 sign-reading: and Amerindians, 20, 24, 35; deciphering of, 43–4, 74, 84, 98, 194 Sirois, Antoine, 68, 70 72, 322n3, 337n17, 338n29 site of memory. See memory, site of sky: symbolism of, 122–3, 128

381

Smart, Patricia, 125, 127, 324n17, n18, n22 Smith, Donald, 340n2, n3 snow. See seasons, winter song(s), 58, 63, 273, 341n9 space, 231, 295, 302, 344n34; and character types, 165; definition of, 5–6, 321n8; and identity, 76, 172–3; and place, 3–6, 41, 169 Stadaconé. See Quebec City steeple: as icon, 62, 78, 83, 160, 288 struggle, 37–8, 64, 126, 173, 199, 233; and identity, 66, 97, 161, 208, 308–9 sublime, 32, 34, 118, 316n18, 317n22 Surrealism, 64, 192 Suzor-Côté, Marc-Aurèle de Foy, 160–1, 269; Après-midi d’avril (plate 6), 145–7; Ite missa est, 158–9; La mort de Cadieux, 58–60 symbolism, 9, 113, 129, 281–2, 318–19n7, 332n11 Taché, Eugène-Étienne, 257 Taché, Joseph-Charles: Cadieux, 56–8 Talbot, Émile, 328n17 texture, 6, 130, 149, 202, 226, 288–9. See also impasto theatre, 246, 252, 261–2 Thom, Ian, 158, 326n4, 327n6, n7 tree, 102, 136, 230–1; symbolism of, 85, 120, 129, 193–200, 264, 300 Tremblay, Mylène, 59, 71, 95, 317n3, 320n3, 321n5 Trépanier, Esther, 12, 129, 313n15, 325n9 Trudeau, Pierre-Elliot, 282, 342n19 Ungava (region of Quebec), 222 Union of Canada (1840–67), 32, 97

382

Index

universality, 173–4, 200, 208–9, 216, 231, 238 Utopia/utopian, 14–15, 31, 314n6, 317n21 Vadeboncoeur, Pierre, 192–3 Van Schendel, Michel, 322n8, 332n11, 333n23 Vanesse, André, 75, 320n1 variety, 80, 83, 292. See also diversity, cultural Vaugeois, Denis, 315n15, 315–16n17, 317n1, 322n1, 340n2 Verthuy, Maïr, 324n18 viewpoint, 43; elevated, 59, 61, 88, 139, 184, 222; imaginary, 17–19, 62, 288–90 Vigneault, Gilles, 9, 208; Mon pays, 269–74 Vigneault, Louise, 214–16 vision/visual perception, 51–2, 54–5, 81, 88, 132, 141–2

voices: and revelation, 99–100, 170–1, 187, 197, 225, 303 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de, 74, 283, 345n3 voyageur, 57, 63–4, 71, 302 Walker, Horatio: Les Battures de l’île aux Grues, 108–10 Warwick, Jack, 56–7, 168, 217, 231, 312n2, 338n21 Watson, Homer, 108 Whitman, Walt, 334n28 winter. See seasons, winter winterscape, 269, 274, 284, 341n10 Wolfe, General James, 47 women: social position of, 112, 125, 199, 241, 257–8, 264 writing, 123–6, 196, 295–6, 304n5 Zola, Émile, 88