Last week, at the Librairie du Québec, in Paris, there were a dozen of us celebrating the memory of François Ricard. A few peeled and almost as many shaved (forgive me) came to underline, a year after his death, the memory of the man who was probably, with Pierre Vadeboncoeur, the best Quebec essayist of his generation. This is particularly what we understand from reading the excellent issue of the journal The Novel Workshop dedicated to him.
Coming out of this small assembly, which was otherwise very nice, we could only reflect on this: that’s what being a province is all about! Just that and all that at the same time. If Quebec had been a country, the one that was one of the great literary voices of our country and of the Francophonie would have been celebrated in a cultural centre. He would have been hailed by a minister of culture or something. We would have seen some famous writers there. In short, all this would not have been confidential.
Especially since François Ricard considered himself a full heir to French literature. Not only had he studied in France, but, aware that he came from what his friend Milan Kundera called a “small nation”, he felt that his access to a larger and universal literary world – which he did not confuse not with these uprooted globalist elites who show off in Paris and Los Angeles — had to go through a relay. However, this relay was naturally for him French literature. That of Montaigne like that of Kundera, that of Flaubert like that of Michel Houellebecq.
Not that he didn’t like Roth and Kerouac. On the contrary. But he felt that, if American literature imposed itself, so to speak, naturally on us, that of France offered us, in addition to the obvious linguistic complicity, a greater space of freedom.
“The dependence which currently binds me to France is infinitely less restrictive, in itself, than that which binds me to the USA, he wrote. Exclusively cultural in the case of France, it is, in the case of the USA, a dependency that is much closer, given its socio-economic and political foundations, given also its irremediable character, to colonial-type dependency. »
At a time when wokism has become the soft-power of American imperialism (of its universities as well as of its multinationals), at a time when in this country it has become commonplace to rewrite the classics of world literature, it is worth recalling how much Ricard saw in literature French language an additional space of freedom for us, Quebecers. And the place of true diversity.
If I speak of François Ricard, it is because we already miss his voice. When, dismayed by the deplorable level of French of the students, our Minister of Education undertook to revise the programs, we could not encourage him too much to reread his work. He will perhaps find comfort in the fight he seems to want to lead without saying too much against the stranglehold of the pundits of pedagogism who dominate the world of education without sharing. Especially with us. A pedagogism which deified the child to the point of not daring to transmit anything to him, which Ricard was one of the first to identify in his great work, The lyrical generation.
Our minister could also discover there that it is not enough to read and write every day to master one’s language. It is not enough to be corrected in all matters, as so many ministers before him have said. Still need to read the best. However, what is better than the great works of the past, those which magnify French, those which really disorient you, those which question us to the most secret of the soul?
Unfortunately, as François Ricard wrote with irony some twenty years ago, it will always be easier to give students “texts that ‘speak’ to them, that is to say that resemble them , which belong to him, which make him feel content with what he is, young, uneducated and good about himself” (Chronicles of a wacky time). Isn’t this the same facility that Bernard Drainville expressed when, in asserting that he wanted to “dust off” the programs, he said above all that he wanted “that it be the fun »?
Yes, we miss Ricard already. I dare not imagine what he would write about these uneducated drag-queens that we offer as models to our children, he who never ceased to observe “the indescribable spectacle of contemporary buffoonery”.
This “belated traveller”, in the words of Kundera, never ceased to castigate our provincialism even if he appreciated the province as a point of view, as a useful and necessary distance to observe the world. He didn’t do it to belittle us, but to elevate us and warn us “against the stupidity and innocence of the times”. Above all, he knew that a people without culture will never be free. Words that our minister should ponder.