Once a month, The duty challenges history buffs to decipher a current topic based on a comparison with a historical event or person.
180 years ago this year, March 7, 1841, Philippe Aubert de Gaspé fils died, almost exactly thirty years before the death of his father and namesake, who died on January 29, 1871. In this family from the nobility of the French Regime and holder of the seigneury of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, we were a writer from son to father, in reverse of the genealogical order.
If the son preceded his father in death, he also preceded him as a novelist. He published in 1837 The influence of a book, considered the first novel in Quebec literature, 26 years before the father published Former Canadians, in 1863, the biggest bookstore success of the century. Early, the son will have been in everything, from the publication of his novel at the age of 23 until death, which won when he was only 26 years old.
Philippe Aubert de Gaspé fils was a meteor in Quebec literature which was then invented. But more than that, he was a master provocateur and even an olfactory terrorist. Its short existence was marked by a taste for hoaxes and provocation, and punctuated by scandals and incredible adventures. Elusive, casual, he was at home everywhere, which explains why he combined the functions of parliamentary correspondent for two competing periodicals with diametrically opposed ideologies, The Canadian, a French-language newspaper close to the Patriote Party of Louis-Joseph Papineau, and The Quebec Mercury, Anglophone combat newspaper of the Party of the bureaucrats.
If he feels at home in the language of Shakespeare as in that of Victor Hugo, the journalist and stenographer is above all a happy troublemaker, imprisoned on multiple occasions for drunkenness and for disturbing public order. If he hadn’t been our first novelist, he would have made a perfect novel character. His hot temper led him one day to commit the irreparable. To Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan who reproached him for lacking objectivity in his work as a journalist, he replied by provoking a duel, going so far as to threaten to beat the member of the Patriot Party with his whip. The latter lodged a complaint with the authorities, who imprisoned the repeat offender.
Once released, the young man, who would have been said to have come out of a swashbuckling novel, decided to take revenge on the entire Legislative Assembly of Quebec. He spread assa foetida, a stink bomb, in the assembly chamber. Much to his joy at having stank the entire deputation of Lower Canada, the rascal took refuge in the family mansion of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli to escape the consequences of his gesture. And it was there that, taking advantage of his forced vacation, he wrote The influence of a book.
The Canadian bibliomaniac
The fate of Philippe Aubert de Gaspé fils is so full of twists and turns that it may seem unique. However, if one seeks to include it in a “connected” literary history, that is to say a globalized history which aims to reconnect the various national histories which have remained for a long time compartmentalized, the author of The influence of a book seems to belong to a series, that which one could call, for lack of a better term, the circle of writers who died too soon, among which the primoromancers, that is to say the authors of a first novel, constitute a class to go.
We can, for example, compare Aubert de Gaspé son of a French poet like Louis-Agathe Berthaud, romantic bohemian and republican who had his heyday in the 1830s and that our first novelist particularly appreciated, citing him three times despite the conciseness of his novel. Berthaud died at 33 in 1843, which makes him almost a model of longevity compared to the age at which Aubert de Gaspé fils died.
The Australian writer Henry Savery also died at a rather venerable age, at 50. The two writers had one thing in common, however: their troubles with the law. Henry Savery, of British origin, was indeed deported to the penal colony of the island of Tasmania, where he published in 1831 Quintus Servinton: ATale Founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence, considered the first Australian novel. Finally, let us evoke the case of Aleksis Kivi, who published in 1870 The seven brothers, the first novel in Finnish literature, before dying two years later at the age of 38.
However, let us be careful not to summarize Aubert de Gaspé fils in his early death and his troubles with the law. He was also a bibliophile, bibliomaniac, and omnivorous reader. One of his contemporaries, Leblanc de Marconnay, left us an enlightening portrait of it: “He never walks, he never sets foot on a steamboat, he never rides a horse without having a book under him. arms, and what is best is that he reads religiously; then he has such a memory that he is able to give you a hundred lines from Berthaud and two hundred lines from Byron without making a mistake in a single syllable! “
Reading was the big business of his life. His novel eloquently testifies to this, which multiplies the citations at the head of the chapter and the implicit or explicit references to other literary works, to the point of appearing as a text written under the influence of books, to use Rainier Grutman’s phrase. .
But the taste for books and reading is not only an ornament in the novel. It is at the heart of the plot which relates how the hero, Charles Amand, learns the art of reading, he who, after having read exclusively a grimoire, Little Albert, discover the exercise of critical judgment and free-thinking thanks to some twenty manuals of the different arts and crafts, in which we can recognize theEncyclopediaby Diderot and d’Alembert.
Charles Amand thus went from intensive reading – a single book read an unlimited number of times – to extensive reading – an unlimited number of books read only once – a phenomenon that occurred in the West between the end of the Enlightenment and the first half of the XIXe century, thanks to the industrialization of the book market.
Romantic alchemy
If Charles Amand aspires to enrich himself by seeking the Philosopher’s Stone, The influence of a book offers a real alchemy of the different romantic genres fashionable at the time, by associating, combining and merging them to produce a hybridity, highlighted by Micheline Cambron.
The work is displayed as a historical novel on the title page, because it freely adapts a bloody news item from the time: the murder of the salesman Guillemette by an innkeeper, on the model of the historical novels of the time. , like Notre Dame of Paris (1831) by Victor Hugo, although the period represented in The influence of a book corresponds to the 1820s, rather than a distant past like the end of the XVe century in the hugolian novel.
Moreover, Aubert de Gaspé fils’s novel is described in the preface as a novel of manners, on the model of the first part of the Human comedy by Balzac. “Études de mœurs”, insofar as the work seeks to take into account the diversity of civil status, by presenting deviant characters such as Guillemette’s assassin or exceptional figures such as the peasant alchemist Charles Amand.
Finally, and above all, this novel unclassifiable by its taste for the macabre, its dark and disturbing atmospheres or its bloody episodes makes one think, as shown by Michel Lord, of the genre of the Gothic novel illustrated by Franke nstein (1818) by Mary Shelley or Han from Iceland (1823) by Victor Hugo.
The labels of historical novel, moral novel or Gothic novel cannot, however, exhaust the astonishing diversity of Influence of a book. Indeed, although the author claims to want to break with classicism and introduce into Quebec, through this first novel, a new aesthetic inspired by romanticism, classical references remain omnipresent, including in the last quote from the work. , taken from Jean-François de La Harpe, the author of Literature course whose authority Aubert de Gaspé fils claimed to reject in his preface.
Is this a final snub from this great prankster that was Aubert de Gaspé fils, a mischievous game aimed at the reader, or even another stink bomb, literary this time? Would it not rather be the sign of the intervention of the father, nourished by classical aesthetics, in the work of the son, a young romantic revolutionary? For his part, Father Casgrain, the first critic of our literature, did not hesitate to attribute to the father the writing of an entire chapter, “The Stranger”.
Regarding the early death of Aubert de Gaspé fils, the same Casgrain supposed that it had been caused by alcohol abuse, which places our primoromancer in another lineage, the one in which Edgar Allan Poe appears among others, died in comparable circumstances in Baltimore in 1849.
Whatever the exact causes of the death of the author of The influence of a book, one thing is certain: his disappearance did not fail to shake his father, who learned the news while he was incarcerated in the prison of Quebec for insolvency. Another strange inheritance from the Aubert de Gaspé family, where the vocation of a writer and trouble with the law were passed on from one generation to the next. Obviously, Quebec literature, at its origins, was not just a matter of virtue or good conscience. Fortunately.
To submit a text or to make comments and suggestions, write to Dave Noël at [email protected].