In his letter to Duty of April 13, Jacques Godbout, taking up the Barthian distinction between “writing” and “writer”, writes that the second “is projected[te] entirely in his work, with an original vision and a language of his own; while the writer uses writing as a simple means of communication”.
I am not sure that such an essentialist vision of literature is very useful in the current debate on the representativeness of the Union of Quebec Writers and Writers (UNEQ). Texts that claim to be literary are nevertheless written in a language that betrays neither original vision nor work of appropriation, in a prose, in short, as devoid of style as it is communicative at will. Should they be banished from the literary domain?
If it is a question of distinguishing between the true writer and the bookmaker, the debate is old and brings us back invariably to the same two nagging questions: where to draw the line? What is Literature?
My definition is probably worth another: any creative and critical thought expressed in written form. The word “review” is used to exclude creative texts produced for advertising or promotional purposes. Obviously, that says nothing about the material conditions of writing. But such thought, involved in the affairs of the world, can (must) have a price.
The problem with Godbout’s conception is that only the authors he calls “non-literary” seem to have economic concerns. “The true writer is not subject to forced labor and must remain free. But precisely, poverty does not make you free…
To explain a certain romantic and almost mystical vision of literature, we must speak of a generational fact. The famous lyrical generation that arrived in literature in the 1960s saw several doors open before it, including those of the NFB, Radio-Canada and university literary studies departments. Not necessarily sinecures, but let’s say that financial security helps to consider writing as a pure and free act. Of course, there are still a few elected officials, most of them crushed by the workload that is the lot of the professorial caste in the year 2023, and who can only dream of this freedom that Jacques Godbout sings about. But the doors are opened more rarely today.
The literature of which the founder and first president of the UNEQ speaks is therefore, in its very essence, an activity placed above the realities of commerce. But if we direct our gaze beyond our borders, this beautiful posture does not stand up to scrutiny for long.
Norman Mailer was, undeniably, a “literary author”, endowed with “an original vision and [d’]a language of its own. His books brought him a lot of money. Like a Balzac restructuring his debts with stacks of slips, he probably wrote several, if not most, under the pressure of a considerable lifestyle and some alimony. Mailer wrote both to produce work and to make money.
Literary history is full of geniuses tormented by questions of money, from the spinach of Céline harassing Gaston Gallimard to put butter on it to Roberto Bolaño, who, on the verge of death, thinks of dividing the enormous 2666 into five separate books to better support her children.
And speaking of children, when Mordecai Richler managed to extort Conrad Black 5,000 bidoos a week for a column in the National Postshould we consider that these texts written to boil the pot of a family of seven, once published in a book, do not belong – lack of nobility obliges – to the work of the brilliant novelist of Gursky ? A futile distinction indeed.
By contrast, Mailer and Richler were writing for millions of potential readers from the outset. The commercial or non-commercial status of Quebec literature is determined less by a problematic essence of literary production than by the contingency represented by the size of its natural market. Octave Crémazie, diagnosing the ills of French-Canadian literature in the second half of the 19th centurye century, already announced that our writers were going to remain “‘amateurs’ as long as they cannot be paid for their work” (quoted by Gilles Marcotte in Institution and drafts). And for lack of being able to establish themselves as a profession with the slightest pay, they are doomed to remain that: amateurs. Simple followers of “literary entertainment”.
But far be it from me to want to compare the blue orange of Quebec to the American watermelon. Take Norway, whose literature is quite radiant for a country of five million inhabitants. The Association of Norwegian Writers (Den norske Forfatterforening, the DnF), founded in 1893 (!), has a little over 600 members – against more than 1600 for the UNEQ. Its mission, Wikipedia tells us, is to “promote Norwegian literature and protect the PROFESSIONAL AND ECONOMIC interests [c’est moi qui souligne] authors”. In other words, you can walk and chew gum at the same time.
A peculiarity of this Norwegian union deserves to be underlined: presenting itself as a union does not prevent it from being selective. Not only is the DnF reserved for authors of two or more books, but the membership process is filtered by a permanent council made up of nine members responsible for reading the works and submitting their recommendations to the board of directors. .
In Quebec, juries made up of peers, when they award literary prizes and creation grants, are already deciding on the viability of quite a few literary careers. So why would a committee of hand-picked Sages, where the different literary generations would be represented and of which a Jacques Godbout could be a member, not be entrusted with the task of deciding between the genius of the language and the recipe books? ?