Once a month, Le Devoir de Littérature, written by Quebec writers, 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.
Some time ago at The big bookstore, French literary program, when she had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Annie Ernaux, the one who always wanted to “write life”, said: “I refuse the novel, and even autofiction. For her part, under the title “Ode to threatened fiction”, Odile Tremblay, in the pages of To have to of December 3, 2022, welcomed the publication by Gallimard, in the Quarto collection, of Réjean Ducharme’s nine novels, while also deploring the proliferation of “writings of the real”, more particularly of autofiction, thus fearing that ” the sense of flight”.
The conflict between fiction and reality is not new. Throughout the 19the century, many novelists, in French Canada and in France, have never ceased to affirm, like Antoine Gérin-Lajoie in the foreword he signed for Jean Rivard, the pioneer (1874): “I am not writing a novel”. “If anyone is looking for wonderful adventures […], added Gérin-Lajoie, I advise him in a friendly way to go elsewhere. And we will remember that Balzac, through The human comedyaimed to compete with civil status…
Published a few months before the Patriot Rebellion in 1837, The influence of a book, by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé fils, is often presented as the first Quebec novel. The author also marks his distance from fiction by displaying a taste for reality. “I described the events as they happened, sticking almost always to reality, convinced that it must always win the advantage over the best plotted fiction”, he writes in his preface. Here we have clearly identified the great culprit, the one through which evil would happen: fiction. She is not the only one to be taken to task, there is also the style, the “beautiful flowery phrases” which were better suited to the “idle courts of Louis XIV”.
The “almost always” is not without interest here since the novel by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé fils does exactly what it claims not to do. It is precisely where he escapes, disobeys the prudence he had given himself as a rule, when he consents more or less consciously to lower his guard, that his truth and his “flight” are to be found. the word of Odile Tremblay. The only concessions made to the imagination, warns the novelist: the main character, Amand, and the murderer. But these are serious, very serious exceptions! That being so, isn’t fiction the art that creates the exception, recognizes it and exposes it?
Let us recall the main plot of this rather disheveled novel: Charles Amand, craftsman of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, his head stuffed with his wild reading of a work of magic called Little Albert, decides to become an alchemist. The novel recounts his misadventures, while reporting various popular legends where fantasy and folklore mingle.
Mario Vargas Llosa writes in The truth through lies (Gallimard, 1992): “At the heart of all [les fictions] blazes a protest. Whoever imagined them did so because he could not live them, and whoever reads them (or believes them while reading them) finds in these fantasies the faces and adventures he needed to increase his life. . It is the truth that the lies of fictions express: the lies that we are, those that console us and compensate us for our frustrations and nostalgia. » The main character of The influence of a book provides an eloquent example.
From the opening, the novel presents Charles Amand as a more than ordinary man. He lives at the bottom of a hill in a “miserable shack”, a “little building almost in ruins”, where, it seems, he would have “removed [les] other inhabitants in order to attend secretly to mysterious works to which he had devoted his life”. The man would be “of medium height”; his clothing, “that of the farmers of the country”. He would have “a livid and pale complexion”, a “brown eye, almost extinct in its hollow socket”. The narrator concludes by affirming that “his whole physique announced a man weakened by misery and the vigils”.
But what vigils are we talking about? Of those of a man who bends over Little Albert, a book of magic that he studies meticulously and with which he believes he has found the recipe to transform vile matter into gold. The man is an alchemist, a “seeker of treasures”, to use the new title that Abbé Casgrain gave to the book when publishing it a few years later. An alchemist, certainly, but above all a reader.
Whose influence? About what ?
Let’s stop at the original title. To be under the influence is to see a mysterious force express itself, suspicious, supernatural of course, and why not diabolical. The word “influence” is also close to “inflection”, “influx” (we speak of nerve impulses) and it is associated with the verb “to influence” which refers to the idea of flowing (in, on ), to insinuate itself into. In Medieval Latin, the word influential »according to Historical dictionary of the French languagedesignated the “flow coming from the stars and acting on the action of men and things”.
How could a censorship (religious, social or political) have been able to bear that a fiction other than its own insinuates itself into people’s consciousness and competes with it on the level of seduction? Everyone had to stay where fate had given them birth, accept their place in this world. “Who do you think you are? »: who hasn’t heard this reaction at least once in their life?
The devil, in the novel by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé junior, is also the smooth talker of the legend of Rose Latulippe, reported here, the great seducer, the stranger, the one who speaks well, who addresses his prey. with “flowery sentences”, which is not from the same world as everyone. He is the one who, like Rodrigue Bras-de-Fer, another legend reported here, defies God and the devil and who, on his return from what is known as “a terrible shock” suffered in “a cursed place when he could not “resist so many cruel emotions”, appears like a wreck, more miserable than he was at the start. The devil, in short, is a metaphor for this very fiction that certain nineteenth-century Canadian authorse century thought they had to fear.
Let us recognize that a national literature inaugurated by a novel entitled The influence of a book, which shows the importance of reading and displays a faith in the impossible, it’s still fascinating. When they deny wanting to make a novel while writing one, could we not see, among the novelists of the nineteenthe century that will follow Aubert de Gaspé son, a ruse allowing them to thwart the censors who were already exerting their pressure on a literature that was struggling to be born?
Science or fiction?
Charles Amand, let’s not forget, is first and foremost a reader. The writer and academic Claude La Charité is right to speak of a “conversion” in this character. After having multiplied the attempts, which all proved to be vain by following the instructions of the book of magic, Charles Amand turns to the works of natural sciences offered by his future son-in-law, and among these to the Dictionary of natural wonders.
The novel foreshadowed such a change of course. The novelist, who is a great reader given the numerous references he slips into his book, would have succumbed to the charms of fiction along the way, but he had to change his mind. In his preface, he claimed to stick only to facts when he did indeed go towards fiction and, in the end, as if that was the purpose of the novel, his character became a man. turned towards science rather than magic, without renouncing the Little Albert“this work which decided the fate of his life”.
This means that the two approaches — fiction and science — coexist in the novel, both in terms of writing and reading. To be honest, they would be made to live together. They would both be places indicated for the soul, sources of astonishment.
An enduring distrust
We recently read that the Quebec Association for the Prevention of Suicide (AQPS) is preparing a guide to good practices for fiction writers. The Ministry of Health is complicit in such an approach and recently asked “school professionals not to recommend the latest children’s novel by author François Blais, which deals ‘explicitly’ with suicide”. A position that went “a bit far”, in the opinion of the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé.
But why fear fiction? What is it about the act of telling that arouses so much mistrust? Out of fear and even repulsion? Why not take a novel for what it is? We could turn the question around and ask ourselves what, in “the writings of the real”, creates such a suspicion. It was they, these “writings of the real”, which showed what certain dominant groups did not want to see or hear, what it meant to be a woman, tired, Jewish, black, homosexual, immigrant, AIDS patient, native, and even intellectual, when it was not or still is not proper to be what one really is.
In short, all fiction says that no one can be sure of the place it occupies. All fiction speaks of legitimacy, of the right to exist. “Inventing the world” or “sustaining it constantly”, as Odile Tremblay would say.