Michel Bélair is publishing these days, with Somme tout/Le Devoir, a collection of his texts published since the end of the 1960s: Live theater. 50 years of creation in Quebec. Here, a text published on April 30, 1970, when the author met Claude Gauvreau to The Charge of the Epormy Moose.
Do you know Claude Gauvreau? I doubt it, unless you are one of the “happy few”. Around him has arisen a sort of conspiracy of silence since his last official manifestation in 1955 or 1956 until very recently, during the Night of Poetry. Almost complete silence. The wall is thick and nothing has managed to penetrate it to date. However, Claude Gauvreau still writes — still writes, I should say. Why this “official eclipse”, when Gauvreau has been producing constantly since 1945, and what is the occasion for this sudden return to the surface?
Everything happens as if those who carry out literary activity by separating “the chaff from the wheat”, by defining the important authors and the parasites, only wanted to let one adhesion emerge from the character Gauvreau: that of Overall refusal and that of the Borduas group. This is sometimes more convenient to account for a “literary era”, even if it means eliminating one of its most authentically current representatives. Overall refusal was certainly an important step for Gauvreau, but it was more than twenty years ago! If Gauvreau had not written anything else since that time, the problem would not arise, it would be superfluous to speak of a conspiracy of silence: at most we could say that it is one of the last vestiges of ancient bohemianism. Montrealer of the 1940s. Which, in addition, has the merit of being sympathetic… But, that is false.
Claude Gauvreau is far from being a survivor, he who is preparing a complete edition of his works in one volume at Bias (1200 to 1500 pages!); it’s a lot for a dying person. Oh, of course, some scholars will say, when speaking of Gauvreau’s poetry, that this is a Dadaist overtone inspired by the principles of the Automatist movement in painting and that “all that is outdated.” An assertion that it is easy to contest by seeing to what extent, thinking of Péloquin, Vanier and company, this “outdated stage of Quebec poetry” was able to influence the young poets who, today, succeed in making the headlines of the newspapers and literary magazines. […]
What is The Charge of the Epormy Moose ? It is both the occasion for violent criticism and the result of a profound brokenness, a profound disconnect. Written in 1956, this dramatic fiction arises, in Gauvreau’s chronology, immediately after a short stay in a clinic where he was treated for attacks of amnesia, the result of a period of too intense work. Therein lies the break, or at least the opportunity to become aware of a profound gap between supervised freedom and daily life. It is a “concentration camp” universe, as he himself says, that he wants to stigmatize in Load… : it is this closed space where being is reduced to the state of sub-human that it is important to denounce.
It is not healthy to border on impotence, even more so when it becomes a common part of existence. “The epormyable moose” is symbolically the central character of the drama, whose only possible mode of existence is the charge, the revolt which can only break down the walls with headbutts to express its refusal to the insane situation that he is subjected to.
The theme is so rich, especially if we remember the time when the text was written, Gauvreau’s writing is so prophetic if we consider that even Ionesco was almost unknown in Montreal in 1956, that the ‘we are rightly surprised that Load… was not the occasion for a revelation. Without wishing to exploit a parallel which could lead to confusion, it is difficult not to make connections between this dramatic situation of the charge and the existential situation of Claude Gauvreau who has always been relegated to the background and who, from a in a certain way, he must also “charge” to break the wall of indifference with which he has been surrounded, and to simply live.
From there, success or failure, either Gauvreau will continue to struggle alone in the cogs of indifference, or his “charge” will be felt as belonging to a world that it is important to make known in depth. At least this is the objective set by ZÉRO, this group of former Saltimbanques united around a common faith in Gauvreau, common faith in the official recognition of the “prophetic genius” of a great poet and playwright.
Claude Paradis, sculptor and director of The Charge of the Epormy Moose, only asks for one thing: an audience. From there, he says, no problem will arise anymore… if it is still true that the authenticity and topicality of a language are still values in which we believe. Claude Gauvreau is entitled to ask himself the same question: we will undoubtedly understand that he hesitates to formulate an answer.