Along with Fernand Dumont, François Ricard is one of the most profound Quebec essayists I have read in my life. I can say this in the absence of any conflict of interest since the man, who died in February 2022, always gave me the impression that he did not like me very much.
He found me, I believe, too militant, too nationalistic and too leftist to appreciate my work. The rare direct exchanges that I had with him were always respectful, but remained cold.
It is true that I happened to scratch a little, in texts, some of his ideas and those of his master Kundera. Ricard, whom all his friends nevertheless say was exemplary modesty, did not like that. If he was humble before the great works of literature, he was less so before those who did not share his vision of things, towards whom he could be sharp.
That never prevented me from frequenting his work with admiration. Enrolled in literary studies at UQAM in the late 1980s, I read with passion the novels of Kundera, considered almost like a god in our ranks. That’s how I discovered Ricard, who wrote the afterwords to the great writer’s novels.
My reading of the first essay contained in the collection literature against itself (Boréal, 1985) was a revelation. In this “Praise of Literature”, Ricard already presented, brilliantly, his entire program. He had begun to read, he explained, to get to know himself and the world, before realizing, while reading, that “it is a waste of time to go through literature to arrive at knowledge”.
Great works, he continued, do not make us more learned; they reveal to us, on the contrary, “the impossibility of knowledge”; they are schools of perplexity and circumspection. They tell us: you who seek ultimate knowledge about life and about your life, “you don’t know, you never knew, you will never know”. It is in this sense that frequenting great works is a perpetual lesson in modesty.
The spirit of this essay, even if I have often betrayed it, has upset my vision of literature and has lived with me ever since. In 2002, in the foreword to an essay I devoted to Quebec historians, I explained that I owed to reading them the broadening of my point of view on the world. Until then, I had looked for the extra soul of the world in literature and I discovered that history gave me a more concrete version.
On re-reading, I realized that my train of thought, on a formal level, reproduced that of Ricard in his essay. So I sent him the text asking him if this proximity bothered him. “Not at all,” he replied generously. A fine reader, Ricard had certainly not failed to detect my admiration for him in this text which, without corresponding to his thought, was inspired by it.
I therefore read with emotion the exercises of admiration devoted to him by the magazine. The Novel Workshop, of which he was a collaborator, in its March 2023 issue. The novelist and translator Dominique Fortier aptly testifies to her “dazzle” in front of Ricard’s critical work, attached not to “clarifying the mystery” of the works, as if they were enigmas to be solved, she specifies, but “to reveal their depth”. Reading Ricard’s texts on Gabrielle Roy and Milan Kundera “increases” our reading of these authors, she concludes with reason.
The essayist Isabelle Daunais, undoubtedly the most brilliant heiress of Ricard, pays homage to his master by insisting on his attachment to the idea of modesty, which he called prosaism and which he found in the great novels.
Two reasons, she notes, support this choice. For Ricard, the value of prose, the antithesis of lyricism or tragedy, is that it concerns itself with ordinary things, with common experience – how to live, love and die – by offering them as a response the uncertainty, the impossibility of an indisputable solution. It therefore necessarily proposes modesty as a vision of the world. There is, this is the second reason, a beauty in this simplicity assuming the precariousness of life and of the world, in this “modest time of ordinary days” that literature can help us to inhabit.
Ricard, insists the essayist Yannick Roy, was not an activist and found the idea of saving the world ridiculous. It was in this spirit that he wrote his remarkable essay The lyrical generation (Boreal, 1992). In my opinion, however, the irony he reserved for committed minds who still believe in it was akin to dogma and lacked, it seems to me, precisely circumspection.
I think I retain the main lesson of the work by admiring it with perplexity.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature in college.