A season in the life of Emmanuel is one of the great Quebec novels. If this masterpiece by Marie-Claire Blais is compulsory reading in the literature education here, it was also, in 1959, only the prelude to an even greater work. Of The beautiful beast (1959) to Nights of the underground (1978), from his American essays (2012 and 2019) to the grandiose cycle Thirsts (since 1995), back on a great American literary journey.
“Marie-Claire Blais will have accomplished this feat, especially with the last part of her work and with Thirsts, to write great American novels, written in French, by a Quebec author, ”explains Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge, her voice hatched by emotion. “It’s remarkable,” said the professor of literature at the University of Montreal.
And so is the entire legacy, the work. As is also remarkable the fact that Marie-Claire Blais is read today by the young generation, estimates Mme Nardout-Lafarge. Alex Noël, 33, who studied it, testifies to this: “We read her as our contemporary, and not as an 82-year-old lady who has been writing novels since 1960”, he illustrates. “She’s more current than a lot of authors my age. “
Marie-Claire Blais writes The beautiful beast in 1955: noticed entry. It then returns in force during the Quiet Revolution with A season in the life of Emmanuel. A work now flagship, and the Prix Médicis 1966. “When she is interested in the battered children of the Great Darkness, in all that can be inscribed in the national narrative and in the discourse on the Quiet Revolution, the public and the critics follow it en masse, ”notes Mr. Noël.
At the forefront, she wrote at the end of the 1960s, in Quebec, on homosexuality. Ahead of her time, she was interested long before her time in racism, LGBTQ + struggles, the homeless, the oppressed of all kinds. “Readers stop following her a bit. There is a low period, and it looks like it’s as soon as she tackles queer, continues Mr. Noël. As soon as she continues to other margins, this time of sexual diversity, she finds herself, and for years, working almost in the shadows. “
Up to Thirsts, whose novels will take her out of this “purgatory”. Thirsts, which was to be a trilogy, says with a sad smile in his voice his editor at Boréal, Jean Bernier. Which was then to be composed of ten novels like so many chapters, and which will only end with the death of its author – a twelfth opus was being written, interrupted.
Of waves and undertows
Thirsts, remarkable for his sentence stretched to the impossible, sometimes over more than twenty pages without a single point; remarkable for the multiple streams of consciousness shared by a host of characters from all walks of life, all baptized, all main, all essential; and remarkable for the intersection between the political, the social, the art, the news.
Blais is amused that Virginia Woolf crosses paths with Marcel Proust – two lifelong influences, confirms the publisher, with William Faulkner, Dante and Dostoyevsky. Marie-Claire Blais works there a flow of all consciousnesses, seeks universality, adds waves, waves again, and surf.
Huge sentences, therefore, adds Mme Nardout-Lafarge, like “a kind of resistance in the end. A sentence that stretches, which wants to encompass everything. The classic phrase leaves out a lot of stuff, Blais’s incorporates as much as possible: what his characters say, do, what they thought, their memories, everything … We are a bit in the lament, the chanting , too. This sentence is incompletion and accompaniment. It is to take, to take away, to encompass ”. Like a desire for a world-phrase.
Radical equality of poetry
And it’s in Thirsts also that Blais’s compassion finds all its power. “There is a tipping point in Blais’ work between cruelty and compassion, analyzes Alex Noël, which occurs in [trois tomes] from Pauline Archange manuscripts (1968 to 1970) ”, remarks the postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Laval University.
“All his characters benefit from a radical equality of poetry, analyzes Kevin Lambert, author of Roberval’s Quarrel. Blais also wonders how to blame the peers. It is in compassion and empathy even for the worst: we enter the head of a terrorist, a rapist, an aggressor, it is more than disturbing; and with her, it participates in a great humanity. “
“Blais succeeds in this feat of putting compassion at the heart of his writing without making a watered-down work, which would lose its ambiguity, which would not deal with difficult subjects,” continues Mr. Noël. By editing the scenes, continues M. Lambert, it shows the paradoxes of humanity. “It always complicates political issues by presenting opposing points of view. And it allows the opposition to even its text. “
Thirsts “Follows the news extremely closely, sometimes ahead of it; she talks about an epidemic in Small ashes [11e livre du cycle, 2020] », Recalls Mme Nardout-Lafarge. Some will also read in advance in the work the massacre at the mosque in Quebec.
“This infinite generosity, which seeks to include all living things, animals, humans, the good, the irrecoverable that are pedophiles and the Nazis, it is political. There is total compassion there. It is to carry and rock misfortune. Literature is used for that ”, estimates the one who directed Readings by Marie-Claire Blais (PUM) with Daniel Letendre, according to the International Days dedicated to the author in 2016.
And that’s what also makes Marie-Claire Blais a difficult author – she said it herself. And essential.