We saw some sad news fall this week. After 11 seasons on the first channel of Radio-Canada, The more the merrier, the more we read, hosted by Marie-Louise Arsenault, will leave the airwaves in June. The last literary program of the state company, although overflowing over the years on other cultural disciplines, kept the real star to the muse of Balzac and Marie-Claire Blais. And this, five days a week and for two hours, by giving new authors the chance to discover, by keeping the napkin ring for the oldest, by giving pride of place to the creative process. Her end creates a real gaping hole for the world of letters, to which the lady already opened her doors in the late show Never without my book.
Of course, Radio-Canada does not intend to slash literature, but it will – let’s understand – more often be diluted in a more diverse artistic and social approach.
The dynamic host has other projects, including, starting next fall, a new Saturday radio talk show, Everything can happen. She will talk about literature again, that’s understood, and will keep the helm of the fight of the books. But how can we expect a daily slot dedicated to written works to be taken up in another form? Cultural programs often pass like shooting stars. The more the merrier, the more we read had been able to last, but basta!
The omnipresence of screens, communicating vessels where other mediums triumph (popular culture, among others), rubs off on the habits of the public; long-term reading decreases. Something to send a moving thought to the books.
After all, their presence is a buttress of the cultural edifice. Children called upon to develop a taste for the arts often begin by deciphering “once upon a time” in the first volumes that come to hand. And decoding through reading the language and imagination of others is a greater stimulus than discovering fictions on a screen; the exercise commands concentration, a superior effort of imagination. As a child, we made our own cinema there by putting images on words; later, avid readers will always return to draw on this sap between two shows, three films and listening to music that enchants their ears.
But the ranks of lovers of literature are being decimated, as we well know. Difficult to concentrate on written signs for hours when everyone consumes information at full speed on their cellphone.
Many parents struggle to attract their offspring to the pages of an unillustrated book. And the Harry Potter wave, which at the time reconciled generations of children with reading, is a thing of the past. Children’s novels from Quebec nevertheless reach their clientele, but the passage towards works for adults, especially the most demanding ones, is made with pain and misery in adolescence. And still it would be necessary to teach Quebec and foreign literature as it should at school. But do you think?
Thus, precious rituals are lost. Appointments with yourself and this author who makes you penetrate the secrets of his intimacy, his fantasy or his knowledge are aborted. However, they help to break down prejudices, to open up to different worlds, to bury themselves in an armchair far from the din of the world, not seeing the passage of time, a sovereign panacea in times of pandemic.
We don’t read enough at home, and less and less elsewhere. Even in France, homeland of writers, the age-old habit of poking one’s nose into a volume is crumbling. And the eyes get irritated under too many screen flashes. And minds go blank. And the chasms of polarization are widening between one and the other. And we look for its roots and its history without taking the trouble to discover them better between pages. All this to say that the end of The more the merrier, the more we read seemed to me part of the spirit of the times. Which doesn’t stop us from being sorry. Authors confided in it; their stories made the listener dream. So the book lived on the radio, as a community art to be celebrated.
And although the Quebec government had announced substantial aid for the revival of culture to deal with the repercussions of COVID-19 — more than $225 million in a three-year plan — I nevertheless thought I saw in the end of a flagship show a collective defeat. Because the popular desire to maintain itself in literature is not really there.
Even if the CAQ government does more for culture than it seemed willing to do at the start, some fabrics are weakening. A social problem nourished by eternal suspicion in the face of the world of letters, considered elitist when it is a bottomless pit of wonder open to all.