In the CEGEP where I teach, a pruning operation is well underway. The library is carrying out a major clean-up and is offering, at very low prices, the works that, according to it, have had their day. It is indeed necessary to make room for the works of the day.
On the large table of the condemned, I find collections of Quebec poetry that I loved fervently in the 1980s, essays, novels and plays that were at the top of the list barely 50 years ago. Today, the punishment falls on them: outdated, all that.
I also find books that predate my birth. I read excerpts from them, often written with elegance, solid, profound, and it leads me to meditate on the impermanence of everything, even the things we believe to be the most essential, and on the powerful faculty of forgetting of humans.
I know well, as Nietzsche wrote, that “no enjoyment of the present moment could exist without the faculty of forgetting”, but it saddens me to see that even works that were powerful in their time fade into indifference.
Dominic Fontaine-Lasnier, a college philosophy professor, shares my melancholy in this regard. In A Philosopher’s Legacy amateur (Nota bene, 2024, 174 pages), it pays tribute to François Hertel (1905-1985), pseudonym of Rodolphe Dubé, “one of the most fervent free spirits that Quebec has known before the Quiet Revolution”, today forgotten and become “a sacrifice of our modern culture”.
In his Political Memoirs (Le Jour, 1993), Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a former student of the philosopher at Brébeuf in the 1930s, wrote of Hertel that he had “been an exceptional initiator for us in several fields”, notably in literature, music and visual arts, because he “spontaneously went towards everything that was new or went against the grain of current tastes”. Jacques Ferron called “my master” when speaking of Hertel.
It was the philosopher’s audacity that had seduced these two intrepid minds. A Jesuit at the time he taught in Brébeuf, Hertel would defrock himself in 1947 and go into exile in France, where he would end his life in poverty. He refused comfort and indifference.
“I am above all a dilettante,” he wrote in 1940. “I am a pure amateur. I am the essential amateur of the joy of living.” In philosophy, this type of statement does not sell. We want something hard, rigorous, and incontestable. However, it is precisely this refusal of abstract theory and the spirit of the system that Fontaine-Lasnier praises in Hertel. “He embodied,” he wrote, “the spirit of jazz in a world still tense with classicism.”
Hertel, deep down, is a sort of Quebec Montaigne, attached to reason, but convinced, at the same time, that the latter “is a crude instrument which cannot fully account for the reality which it has given itself the mission of explaining.”
He abandoned the Christian faith for “cosmic humility,” practiced philosophy as an art of living in the manner of the Stoics, and cultivated a skepticism toward any theory that distances one from the experience of reality. “Almost everything is inexplicable,” he noted, “because life, despite what we have, never ceases to defy the limits that we would like to assign to it.”
To present his modest and free hero, Fontaine-Lasnier has chosen a form to match. To the tomb of Hertel that opens the essay, he adds an autobiographical chapter in which he argues for teaching philosophy in college inspired by the style of the forgotten thinker, both a passionate “storyteller of ideas” and a cautious doubter. An interview with the critic Guylaine Massoutre, one of the rare specialists of Hertel’s work, and a small anthology of the philosopher’s aphorisms complete the program. Faithful to the spirit of Hertel, the essay, imbued with melancholy, stimulates reflection without imposing a thesis. It is beautiful.
Among the forgotten of our cultural history, women, obviously, are not lacking. In Cultural modernities in the feminine, 1900-1960 (Somme toute, 2024, 136 pages), feminist researchers, under the direction of Marie-Noëlle Huet and Chantal Savoie, breathe new life into the words and actions of some of them.
Marie-Ève Sévigny explains the “remarkable feminine freedom” demonstrated by Michelle Le Normand in her chronicles of Duty ; Camille Toffoli presents the “working-class feminism” of the brilliant Éva Circé-Côté; Cato Fortin looks at the mysterious novelist Angéline Hango; Jennifer Bélanger highlights the journalistic work of Solange Chaput-Rolland, who claims the right of women to “talk about everything”; Marie-Pier Tardif illustrates the central role of women in Montreal’s musical life by telling the story of the Ladies’ Morning Musical Club, founded in 1892. That’s beautiful, too.