When the death of Louis Gauthier was announced, it seemed to me that all the credit due to him had not been emphasized strongly enough. After all, this discreet writer, devoured by the concern for perfection, was he not one of our best feathers? His books, in my opinion, are in any case among the most delightful, among the most brilliant.
Far from being pure travelogues, despite some of his titles which might suggest otherwise, his books invite the discovery of inner worlds. They have something unique, strong, pure. Louis Gauthier is one of the only local novelists, with François Barcelo perhaps, to have been able to handle, in a genre that is entirely his own, a humor that does not spoil the beauty of his spare writing, nor the seriousness of his thoughts.
I have come across this disheveled on occasion. He didn’t make a particularly big impression on me. In nearly sixty years of writing, interspersed with moments of silence, Gauthier has published sparingly. He led a discreet life. He had nothing of the pseudo-great ultra-media writer whose rants contribute to prevent to see for a time the thinness of the work. In a world that so easily confuses noisy outbursts with the light of silence, Louis Gauthier may have seemed suspect.
I plan, over the next few days, in the heart of the humidity of summer, to reconnect with Gauthier’s books. Where to start ? In the end, it may not really matter. His books are always carried more by a style and atmospheres than by a story. In the meantime, I posed beside my bed his Trip to Portugal with a German. “I like, when I wake up, to light the lamp on the bedside table and read, warm in my warmth and in that of the book,” he writes. Me too. In these pages, I know that everything is true, since if necessary everything is invented, as he knows.
I also pulled from the library The Adventures of Sivis Pacem and Para Bellumone of his first books, a kind of crazy, rather destabilizing tale, in which Montreal, plunged into a time of hallucinated dreams, ironically appears as “one of the most beautiful cities in Canada”, with “its streets paved with gold and its Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral.
In parallel with this reading, I have been immersed for a few days in a completely unexpected essay. Some time before dying this year, the geographer and writer Luc Bureau had published a devastating essay entitled Quebec disfigured. In this “geography of ugliness”, that of the world in which we are immersed, Bureau intends to show that the need to preserve the environment cannot arise without ever directly addressing the question of its beauty.
Why, in a time when there is constant question of ecology, is there so little question of aesthetics in connection with it? Do the links between the two not exist? Luc Bureau notes that environmentalists, when talking about the effects of urban sprawl, consider first and foremost the effects of atmospheric pollution linked to factories or to the increased use of the automobile, the loss of agricultural land, the hardening and sealing of soils, the destruction of ecosystems (forests, marshes), the withdrawal of fauna, but without ever really daring to ask the question of broken beauty. In this same furrow, the issue of deforestation channels all the analyzes on the side of natural habitats, fauna, flora, erosion, runoff, landslides, the increase in carbon levels in the atmosphere and now possibly forest fires. Not to mention the beauty.
However, writes Bureau, there is an obvious complementarity between ecology and aesthetics. Is it even possible to envision the future on earth without further considering the ugliness we surround ourselves with without fail? Our landscapes, what have they become? This very word landscape, writes Luc Bureau, can henceforth designate everything and anything, beginning, in our country, with “the signs of a proven anti-urbanism: stupefying functionality, delirious architecture, sinister dilapidation, homogeneity and continuity failing, debilitating laissez-faire”.
Enraged as ever against the excesses of society, Bureau believes that we should raise a monument dedicated to commemorating the accomplishment of his obscenities. Yes, it would be necessary to underline by a monument, he says, the disastrous role of speculators, municipal officials, bureaucrats, planners, in short of everyone, “including ourselves”.
Luc Bureau has style, brilliance, panache. And he often manages to be funny in the tragic portrait he paints of our sad relationship to the world. It deals with the fate we have given to lakes, rivers and the forest, while showing the ridiculousness of advertisements that would have us believe that paradise is in all that we have made ugly. Have promoters of all stripes won their bet forever to make ugliness even more ugly?
To maintain a keen eye on our world, this cultivated spirit that is Luc Bureau has summoned the Greek gods as well as the historian EP Thompson or even Italo Calvino and Dostoyevsky. A unique geographer, Bureau writes well. Alright. Tremendously well. On the other hand, his small drawings are quite insignificant.
Quebec disfigured, this geography of ugliness signed Luc Bureau, can be crossed without difficulty, in one go. Just like the books of Louis Gauthier. In his Journey to the Maghreb in the year 1400 of the Hegira, his latest book, Louis Gauthier writes: “Literature, if we did not cheat, could only lead to silence. Cheat in front of the silence that unfairly surrounds such loud voices! Cheat by reading them!