Once a month, under the pen of writers from Quebec, Le Devoir de literature proposes to revisit in the light of current events works from the ancient and recent past of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreading? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with The duty.
If, on a winter’s evening, a traveler asked me what book he should get to approach literature and, in the same breath, current Quebec society, I would advise him without hesitation The Survivor, by Germaine Guèvremont. Published in 1945, the same year as Second hand happiness, by Gabrielle Roy, it inaugurates a tradition more than it closes another. First sketches of the novel, the stories ofIn the groundin 1942, still belong to the regionalist vein while The Occurring is of a completely different scope. While the questions of otherness, reception and immigration are at the very heart of contemporary concerns, it is important to read or reread this large fresco depicting an island community placed in front of the “wide world”. , represented by the so-called “great-god-of-the-roads”.
Germaine Guèvremont’s novel renews the cycle of earth novels from the inside, while simultaneously producing its counterpart, the anti-model: the character of the Survenant, a man with an enigmatic past, arouses both envy and desire. admiration of those he meets. The action takes place in 1909 and 1910 in the islands of Sorel, along the St. Lawrence River, more particularly in one of them called the Chenal du Moine.
There lives a closed society, attached to traditional values and prey to clan rivalries that the presence of a handsome foreigner will only heighten. In this enclave withdrawn into itself, condemned to repeat the same gestures from one year to another, from one season to another, the arrival of the Survenant causes a shock effect. Effect already predictable from the start of the novel:
One autumn evening, at the Chenal du Moine, as the Beauchemins were getting ready for supper, a knock at the door made them straighten up. He was a good-sized, young-aged foreigner, bundle on his back, asking for food.
— Approach the table. Approach without embarrassment, Survenant, cried Father Didace to him.
The reception of the head of the family is spontaneous, generous. This will not be the case for the other guests, the daughter-in-law Phonsine and the son Amable, who immediately perceive the intruder as a possible competitor in the esteem of the father. And the newcomer sprayed his face with water from the pump “while eyes were determined to follow his slightest movement. One would have said that he brought a new virtue to a gesture yet familiar to all”. This remark by the narrator sums up in a few words the stakes of the novel. This foreigner, referred to as Survenant, was immediately hired for work on the farm by Didace Beauchemin.
A certain image of freedom
Bringing “a new virtue to a familiar gesture”, such will be the function of the character who, skilled at work and always ready to carry out the tasks entrusted to him, nevertheless upsets the habits of the peasants. An emblematic hero, a modern version of the legendary woodsman, he represents a certain image of freedom.
But no more than Maria Chapdelaine was able to marry the handsome François Paradis, Angélina Desmarais, in love with the Survenant, will not be able to hold him back. A “committed” man without long-term commitment, not “domesticable” although a worker in the fields, he never ceases to dream of the “vast world” he has already frequented and of which he gives a vibrant eulogy during a convivial evening at the Beauchemins:
You guys don’t know what it’s like to love to see the country, to get up with the day, one fine morning, to spin away alone, with a light step, a lighter heart, everything you have on your back.
And faithful to the call of the open sea, the “great-god-of-the-roads” to leave one morning as mysteriously as he had come.
The stay of the Survenant among the inhabitants of the Chenal du Moine will have made it possible to oppose, in a contrasting vision, the supporters of tradition and those who are sensitive to an openness to other horizons and other ways of life. Unlike the man engaged in Thirty Acres of Ringuet (1938), a Frenchman whose presence in no way changes the customs of the people around him, the character created by Germaine Guèvremont shifts the old into the new and signals the end of an era. The insular dimension of the Chenal du Moine society, rich in heritage values, will now have to integrate into its imagination the dimension of the “vast world” symbolized by the Survenant.
Another peculiarity of the novel which testifies to the modernity of the book: the language of the narration incorporates certain expressions, such as “the evening was pulling the rest”, “he was cleaning up around”, expressions not marked by particular typographical signs, such as quotation marks or italics . The language of the dialogues and of the passages introducing a free indirect style is the French peasant language, with its Quebec lexical and syntactic particularities.
Also note: the word used to characterize the Survenant is an English expression transformed and in a way naturalized in French. never mind has become, in the mouth of the Survenant, “neveurmagne”. The otherness represented by English is no longer experienced in the mode of threat or aggression, but in the mode of smiling appropriation.
Germaine Guèvremont seeks to express this fundamental fact that could be called hospitality in language. Thus, this book which reproduces a rural universe in full mutation announces up to a certain point the linguistic innovations which will follow. In this context, an allusion to Gargantua — and therefore to Rabelais — in the mouth of the Survenant is not innocent. By acquiescing to a form of strangeness in language, Germaine Guèvremont contributes to subtly displacing both the social order and a certain order of discourse.
In one of her conferences, the writer affirms the need to use the words of her community by comparing her situation in the French language to that of the Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain, author of Dew Governors. Here again, the novelist innovates by affirming her solidarity with other French-speaking writers.
Journalist, mother, novelist, lover
Born in Saint-Jérôme, in the Laurentians, on April 16, 1893, Germaine Grignon was the daughter of a learned lawyer and the cousin of Claude-Henri Grignon, famous author ofA man and his sin. She studied at Sainte-Scholastique, where she spent her childhood, then in Montreal and Toronto, until the age of 16. In 1916, she married Hyacinthe Guèvremont, with whom she had four children. The couple, after a few years in Ottawa, settled in Sorel before returning to Montreal in 1935.
The stay in Sorel allowed Germaine Guèvremont to develop a career as a journalist, a real starting point for her work as a novelist. Invited to write for the newspaper The Gazette, of Montreal, and for the Mail from Sorel, she wrote chronicles in English and French about the events of Sorel life. Back in Montreal, she then collaborated with the magazine Peasant, then headed by Françoise Gaudet-Smet. Several of these texts will be found later, more or less modified, in his first collection of short stories. In the ground (1942), as well as in his novel The Occurring.
Germaine Guèvremont’s career is an example of a work in the making, a work in progress or “writing by rebounding”, as she describes it herself, elaborated by successive touches until the version published in 1945, a version which itself will be the object of minor transformations during its various editions. First published by Éditions Beauchemin, the novel was published in France in 1946, by Plon, in a collection directed by the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, then translated into English in Canada and the United States in 1950. In 1947, Marie Didace, centered on the female character of Acayenne Blanche Varieur, a newcomer in the world of Beauchemin. Added to this are the radio, television and film adaptations, which won the favor of a large audience.
Critics and readers have made a great effort to find out the name of the person who would have inspired the novelist in the creation of her character. Was it Bill Nyson, the Norwegian journalist with whom she was in love at twenty and who preferred Jeanne, her older sister? A few years later, in 1926-1928, it was this same brother-in-law who invited Germaine Guèvremont to collaborate on The Gazette. Isn’t there also in the Survenant, still dressed in his mackinaw, a reminder of John Smith, this young man of Aboriginal origin whose adventure the journalist recounted for The Sorel Courier and who had undertaken the insane project of crossing the sea in a canoe?
Finally, we believe we find in her great-god-of-the-roads some traits of the poet Alfred DesRochers, Guèvremont’s friend and literary adviser, with whom she maintained a long correspondence. The novelist herself gave up giving her Coming a surname: after naming him Malcolm-Petit de Lignères in the original edition of the book, she withdrew this reference in her definitive edition. Let us conclude with Yvan G. Lepage, author of a critical edition of the novel, that Le Survenant, magnetized by the need to “see the country”, is “a synthesis of all the men who really counted in the life of Germaine Guèvremont” .
From the first written tales to the modern Don Quixote, passing through all the comers and other avatars of the foreigner or the woodsman who shake up traditions and bring their share of dreams and passion, Quebec writers include in their stories this need for rootedness and wandering that already characterized the first explorers of New France. May Didace Beauchemin’s welcome serve as an example to accompany the extreme adventure, doomed to a thousand dangers, that today’s migrants attempt, those who, like Survenant de Guèvremont, know how to give “a new virtue to a gesture yet familiar.