The recent literary prize list of The Press (“Our 25 new classics”, October 5, 2024) surveying the last quarter of a century has caused chatter in the cottages of Quebec writers – and certainly more than in the living rooms of the rest of the population.
Certainly, to paraphrase one Internet user, “there are worse things than that on the planet at the moment”. But perhaps it is still interesting to identify the colors? Each ranking reveals our present, our aspirations for tomorrow, our blind spots as well. These lists have the merit of drawing up a sort of inventory, inevitably incomplete, inevitably subjective.
This list, whose legitimacy rested on the shoulders of a large panel – 37 “experts”, we are told – is no exception. In the opinion of several writers who contributed to it, and we feel it clearly when reading it, it was strongly influenced by literary prizes, media coverage and sales. These are certainly not criteria to be rejected out of hand, even if they should not essentially constitute the lifeblood of a literary canon. It is therefore a list of achievements which above all reminds us of what has really “worked” over the last 25 years for us. With few exceptions, it continues to ignore works which, for all sorts of reasons, have escaped the cracks of the media net: such is the game of honor rolls, whatever the field covered.
This type of classification therefore sheds light on today’s needs, including greater representativeness – which is something we should absolutely welcome. Among the essential voices, those of women and Indigenous people. In this sense, there was a great emotion in discovering an entirely feminine “podium”, even if the obligation to use sporting metaphors clearly reveals what underlies the exercise: a competition between the works.
The domination of the novel
But another very interesting aspect that emerges from this enterprise is the vision of literature that many “people from the Quebec literary community” have – this is how The Press qualified the 37 participants in the selection process. Among them, writers, booksellers, publishers, literature professors, journalists. I would like to point out here that their work was certainly arduous, thankless, necessarily imperfect; my objective is not to denigrate the result of the compilation of their choice, but to analyze its currents.
First of all, we will not be surprised by the overwhelming primacy of the novel: in Quebec, to be a writer is to have published novels. The other genres are written by “authors”: it is not the same thing and, above all, it does not have the same prestige. Thus we find, out of 25 books selected, 21 novels. Only one collection of poetry is retained (Message sticks/Tshissinuatshitakanaby Joséphine Bacon), a comic strip (Paul in Quebecby Michel Rabagliati) and two essays (The boys clubby Martine Delvaux, and The habit of ruinsby Marie-Hélène Voyer). I count Paper towns by Dominique Fortier in the novels, even if I know that it is subject to discussion.
Among these 21 novels, a third are autofictions or works strongly inspired by the personal trajectory of their author. Sign of the times. No play appears on the list — one of the experts wrote on the Internet, to explain the absence of a play, that he had focused “only” on literature. I therefore deduce that comics are literature, but not theater. We learn something every day!
What about other genres?
Where are we today with literary genres? Faced with the ancient division of five genres (narrative, poetic, theatrical, epistolary, argumentative), what should we propose? Certain sub-genres have not been relevant for a long time: fabliaux, picaresque novels, moralities, elegies… Post-modernity has preferred to no longer worry about labels, taking refuge in formal adventures claiming to mix genres.
Among the Anglo-Saxons, the great gap is between fiction and non-fiction. But that doesn’t solve everything… And is comics a literary art? Is the text thinkable without the drawings? For some, if it flirts with literature at times, as cinema can do on occasion, it no longer means anything without its illustration. For others, it is essential to highlight the literary approach of its authors. No luck, however, for Quebec cartoonists: their works will only be eligible for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in the “illustrated books” category… if they are intended for young people. Otherwise, they are automatically excluded from the competition, here they are declared non-literary by the Governor General. Go figure something out!
As for the so-called “text” song, is it part of literature? We would have been tempted to exclude him until this curious award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. Defenders of this attribution alleged that the texts of his songs were sufficient in themselves, apart from any music. An argument worth thinking about!
Finally, in the little game of rankings that newspapers are fond of, it seems to me that it would have been fairer, if we absolutely wanted to build a canon of new classics, to draw up a list of the 20 novels that marked Quebec in the last 25 years. And not 20 pounds. There is no doubt that some of the protagonists in the file were keen to give letters of nobility to genres other than the novel (in my opinion there are not many of them), but all in all, their enterprise was in vain: what emerges from the list is that only the novel has true literary value.
love them all
However, beyond the very important reminder of the existence of other genres, a list of 20 novels would have had the merit of ensuring that the sub-genres of the novel (youth, autofiction, imagination, history, travel literature, science fiction, suspense, detective, short stories, etc.) are more represented, or at least considered. Obviously, this list would also have aroused criticism – but you have to be ready to hear them when you dare to proclaim “here are the 25 new classics”!
Above all, it would have allowed the upcoming publication of different classifications of Quebec literature, by genre. “Oh my, Olivier, you’re so naive! Do you think there is all this space in the august pages of The Press ? Be happy already that a file was devoted to literature, and take your equal gas. »
Yes, I admit, my desire is utopian. But I find myself dreaming of greater equity between literary genres, I who love them all, without any hierarchy. Whether in the form of favorites, prize lists or medal races, my preference being the simple injunction “Have you read so-and-so?” », a sort of reminder, more humble and fraternal, sororal.
In this case, I would have liked to highlight children’s literature, where we would have easily found Élise Gravel, Marianne Dubuc, Dominique Demers, Suzanne Lebeau; the essay, where there would have been, in addition to the remarkable Martine Delvaux and Marie-Hélène Voyer, Serge Bouchard and Alain Deneault (I don’t think we can talk about the essay in Quebec over the last 25 years without naming these two last); the comic, where Michel Rabagliati would undoubtedly and rightly have reigned, but also, alongside him, Guy Delisle, Julie Doucet, Catherine Ocelot, Jean-Paul Eid; poetry, where there would have been, let us hope, in addition to the immense Joséphine Bacon, Denise Desaultels, Louise Dupré, Hélène Dorion, Hélène Monette, Natasha Kanapé-Fontaine, Daria Colonna, Camille Readman Prud’homme, Tanya Langlais ; finally, the theater, where we would have found, I hope, Carole Fréchette, Evelyne de la Chenelière, Fanny Britt, Sarah Berthiaume, Michel Marc Bouchard, Wajdi Mouawad, Étienne Lepage, Olivier Choinière.
And so many others that I forget, that I don’t know, that I can’t wait to discover.
We would then have taken the measure that the majority of Quebec poetry of the last 25 years has been written in the feminine (and underlined again that Denise Desautels, undoubtedly one of our greatest writers of all genres combined, entered into the prestigious “Poetry” collection by Gallimard, the only Quebecer to be there with Gaston Miron), that the publishing house La Pastèque played a vital role in the development of Quebec comics, that the dynamism of children’s literature in our country is the envy of many countries, that Quebec theater continues to promote our literary culture (I almost put capital letters) throughout the French-speaking world and beyond. Because that’s what a list of achievements is for.
And remember in passing that there are literary writers on our land who have written not (only) novels, but, they too, “books that changed Quebec”.