Once a month from the pens of Quebec writers, Le Devoir de literature offers to revisit works from the ancient and recent past of Quebec literature in the light of current events. Discoveries? Proofreadings? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with The duty.
While Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal publishes the works of Jacques Brault in four volumes in the bnm collection (Bibliothèque du Nouveau Monde), the opportunity for a new reading invites us to take their measure.
Born on March 29, 1933 and died on October 19, 2022, just a year ago, Jacques Brault leaves behind an immense body of work, of which poetry is the keystone. But the poems should not make us forget the essays, nor the rigorous work of the critic and the editor, notably his edition of the complete works of Saint-Denys Garneau, published in 1971 with his great medievalist accomplice, Benoît Lacroix. Rereading Brault, an essential, demanding, necessary task, but also complex and almost infinite.
Scattered throughout his work, numerous autobiographical fragments constitute partial openings onto the absent story which would be its framework. Can we rebuild it? From his story Agony (1984) to the prose collected in There is no more path (1990), and later in Lost paths, found paths (2012), to isolate only a few landmarks in the continuation of an uninterrupted writing, the poet advances towards us and disappears in the very movement in which he appears.
It is in this movement that his work invites us to recognize his gesture, this always undecided, unfinished progress. A founding motif, to the point of becoming its fundamental metaphor, the path is the image of this journey marked by the precariousness of things, the fragility of the moment, the passage of time. “ Brault’s precariousness »tell us the authors brought together by François Hébert and Nathalie Watteyne, following a rich conference held in Sherbrooke in 2006 (Nota bene, 2008).
Re-reading Jacques Brault today would not first of all be moving towards this work marked by fragility and melancholy? Born while fascism was asserting itself in Europe, the poet saw his youth plunged into the chaos of the Second World War which would quickly reach French Canada. Without it being possible to say that it constitutes the central myth, war remains both the starting point and the continuing theme of his work.
Present from the beginning, it reveals all of Brault’s advances in the service of peace, friendship and love. Faced with the devastations of which he becomes a witness, his poems are filled with his efforts against violence, to which he gave the best of his philosophical meditation on existence and the continuity of experience.
Say the heart of existence
I understand here this continuity as a possibility of a connection of the poetic and the philosophical. This would be the essential core of his work, the possibility of expressing the heart of existence, but without insisting, always with the right distance and infinite discretion. A respect for the limits of silence, an ethic. In the midst of violence and noise, overcome the noise, create a space for escape, make withdrawal possible. To access this space, is it not to trace the path towards the salvation offered by the poem? Inhabited by a constant concern for simplicity, the work is built on this path that the poet has never ceased to tread.
I would like to propose this rereading today in the specific context of a particular war, the war which makes the entire territory of Ukraine a bloody battlefield, undermined by bombs, target of all drones and become the subject of a daily column for us who are so far from it. It is not a simple repetition, but a rebound in history which takes us back to the last century, to the collapse of the communist dream and the emergence of a demand for sovereignty which finds in the work by Jacques Brault a tragic echo.
In the beautiful essay she devoted to it (In the footsteps of nowhere. Journey of the work by Jacques Brault, Leméac, 2019), the poet’s daughter, Emmanuelle Brault, recalls how this ideal of peace permeates the work throughout, since the decisive break, in the wake of the events of October 1970, with all forms of ideology associated with violence. Definitive, the distance from the magazine Bias cannot, however, erase what will have been the commitment of a generation.
Nothing seems more decisive than the event which constitutes the beginning in the writing itself. I reread “Suite fraternelle”, this immense poem, first published in 1963 and reprinted in 1965 in Brault’s first collection, Memorybefore being expanded for a reissue in France in 1968. I was still his student when this book reached us, at the same time as his founding article on Bias“For a Quebec philosophy”.
I want to reread this sequel on the front line of sovereign Ukraine invaded by Russian tanks, and which is found strewn with the remains of these soldiers who left to defend the homeland. Brault quotes the Russian poet, born in kyiv, Ilya Ehrenburg: “ Ubi bene, ibi patria. / Where we are well, there is the homeland. In reality, the homeland is also where we are very bad…” It is there, on this line, that the sequel written in memory of his brother Gilles, fell under bullets during the Canadian landing on the beaches of Sicily in July 1943, regains all its meaning. Because there are many people today, at the Kiev or Kharkiv station, who come to claim the coffin of a brother, a father, a husband, as Brault witnessed when this fateful telegram arrived at his home. which announced the death of Gilles.
Assume an inheritance
Collection Memory consists of three parts. First, a set of poems brought together under the title “Quotidiennes”, which opens with a tribute to the poet’s father, “ The manufactured man “, symbol of a broken society. This homage takes the form of an injunction to consent to the poverty of the world of the factory: “Consent to the smoke which surrounds us / consent to the siren which pierces us / it is the paltry price of an obol / for every palm that hunger cracks.” Let us also reread, in the poem “Like so many others” and in several poems from this first set, this persistent hymn to the love of the one who will be the companion of his life and who carries their child.
At the heart of these poems, the reminder of those who gave their lives, “helmeted with certainty”, and simply named in the poem “To those”, where we hear an echo of François Villon. With each verse, melancholy becomes a signature: “Time pours its paste into each crack / Time brings night back to the fold of day / And the dead are constantly reborn in the arm of memory”.
Next comes the poem in memory of his brother Gilles, “Suite fraternelle”: “I remember you / Gilles / my brother forgotten in the land of Sicily / I remember a summer morning in Montreal / I followed your empty coffin / I was ten years old / I didn’t know yet.” Evoked against the backdrop of the poor and frozen world of the Quebec winter, the death of the elder brother mixes with the world of the poor of the Laurentian land and with the image of the father and mother toiling hard in a country which is slow to to be born, “country of anonymous death”, “country that misses the unlimited redskin”. But Gilles’ death will not have been in vain, the brother lives again among these people “with knock-knees and gnarled hands as he groveled in shame”.
The third part of the collection, “Memory”, gives it its title. The poet returns to his father “lost in the centuries and the new space of our puny anger”, but the poetic recall of these “old things” is marked by the political anxiety of forgetting. He returns to his brothers, Fernand and Gilles, and to his wife, Madeleine, to the dead of Italy, to Dachau and Hiroshima, to France and Poland. How, he asks, can we raise the work of memory against forgetting and “despair” and continue to walk, “enlarged by an absence”, we who “are not in the world”, who “do not are not our own?
The verses on the last page of this collection vibrate with the political company of these years of commitment and remind us that, during its inaugural publication, the poetry of Jacques Brault already carried what would determine it for the rest of the work, the political will to assume a legacy. Overcoming the harshness of the origins, of course it was necessary, but also and above all giving the word a mission of love and generosity.