Gilles Archambault will be 90 years old next September and he does not pretend not to know it. “For a few months, he writes in The candor of the patriarch (Boréal, 2023, 112 pages), I offer, in spite of myself, a rather distressing spectacle. I walk more with difficulty, I no longer leave my house without leaning on a cane. »
Death does not scare him, even if he is a little afraid of losing his temper at the final hour. ” [Ma vie], he notes, I have seen it enough, I have examined it from every angle, it is moth-eaten, it will soon be out of use. Archambault therefore confides that he does not wish to become a centenarian.
It’s his business, of course, but I would like to tell him that as far as I’m concerned, his departure is not urgent. For more than 30 years, I have never missed his books and I will never say that I have read enough.
My earliest memory of his work dates back to the 1980s. My older brother had read one of Archambault’s collections of chronicles and had summarized one of them for me. The writer testified to his attachment to Montreal and concluded by saying that he loved urban life so much that, even in the event of extreme pollution, he would stay in town with a gas mask.
In my village, a speech like that of Archambault could only astonish deeply. What ? Love the big polluted city? The audacity of such a position, formulated gently, seduced me. I discovered an author allergic to received ideas.
Archambault, in fact, in a classical style, that is to say simple, sober and elegant, spoke of human moods and feelings with disturbing accuracy. Lyrical, in a way — it defines itself, in The candor of the patriarch, like “the cantor of a hesitant ego” — but never grandiloquent, Archambault offered a melancholy meditation on the restless existence of the ordinary man. He was doing literature in a minor key.
“Retracing your steps”, a short story from the collection Barely a little air jazz (Boréal, 2017), makes the writer’s little music gracefully heard. Every year, an aging man returns to the places of his not particularly happy childhood. He is surprised to see that things are disappearing, that he is now walking “in an unknown country”. Despite everything, he goes in front of the house where his first lover lived, imagines that the latter opens the door for him and is frightened at the sight of him. “People do not understand that we are attached to memories, notes the narrator. Especially if we try to convince them that they form the very fabric of our being. »
Can we really retrace our steps, rediscover, if only for a moment, the child that we were and the loved ones of that time? The narrator, without believing it, renews his pilgrimage every year, “as if it were possible that I find at the bend of a street an object or a word that would allow me to finally understand why I will be this a man whom nothing and no one has been able to appease”. This short story is a masterpiece in small format.
This object or this word containing the secret of his identity, Archambault of course never found it. In this “twilight book” that is The candor of the patriarch, he admits to having had illusions about the possibility of knowing each other. He knows, today, that he will never achieve this goal, but does not regret the quest that has driven him throughout his life. “To give up questioning, he notes, would be to abdicate. »
Was he deluded, in the same way, about his status as a writer? His propensity for self-mockery saved him from it. “I would have been at best a local writer, he notes at the time of the balance sheet, applied to write as close as possible to himself, moreover constantly surprised that people read him. »
This is not false, but I will add, using the words of the critic Michel Lord, that “whatever one thinks, Archambault is one of the greats of literature, unknown on a world and even national scale” . His “slightly desperate tales”, according to his own expression, are worthy of a Chekhov.
As an old man, Archambault confides that he daydreams all day long because “it’s also living to resuscitate moments of strong emotion that we have known”. Activism has never been his strong point, but he nevertheless insists on repeating one of his rare convictions. “I still believe, for example, that Quebec has everything to become a country,” he writes. I also believe that it will be more or less in the medium term more and more drowned in the shoddy multiculturalism advocated by Ottawa. To see that my compatriots have other worries saddens me. »
Stay a little longer, Gilles. Your word is precious.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature in college.