The walk-in clinic around the corner made room for me. Lucky for me. Delighted, I waited my turn on a black vinyl chair, in the middle of an all-white environment. In my hands, to read in the meantime, a yellowed copy of The swallowing of the swallowed. I had just found it, on the way to the clinic, in one of those boxes of books to give away that now abound in certain neighborhoods. Finding this book, I said to myself, the very week that Gallimard published Ducharme’s complete works of fiction, cannot be entirely by chance.
All the same, this book is not rare. Since its initial publication in 1966, dozens of reprints have circulated. Even a cheap, completely illegal pirated edition was printed in Quebec, a clear sign of the importance of this novel, of its place, of the enthusiasm it generated.
Montreal publisher Pierre Tisseyre, father of animator Charles Tisseyre, had refused to publish a first book by Ducharme, which he had only read in part. In his letter of refusal, the publisher indicated that he would like to read other texts by the writer, provided that they were better presented, shorter, and “more controlled”. Ducharme got off with it and knocked on another door, on the other side of the Atlantic. His rejected novel, topped with a beautiful dedication to Marie-Claire Blais, will appear under the name of the oceantum.
In Paris, the manuscript of The swallowing of the swallowed finds itself in the hands of the Gallimard reading committee. Dominique Aury, one of the readers, affirms that the first portion of the book “takes from the masterpiece”. This enthusiasm is supported by that shown by Raymond Queneau. It is necessary, judges the editor, to publish without delay. The opinion is also very clear: “Should have the Goncourt. This price, Ducharme will not have it. In Canada, in February 1967, The swallowing of the swallowed will obtain the Governor General’s Award, French section, but in the poetry sub-category.
“When my eyes are open, it is by what I see that I am swallowed, it is in the belly of what I see that I suffocate. I hadn’t had so much time to get past the always amazing first sentences of this eternal book that all the calm of the medical clinic where I happened to be waiting was suddenly shattered.
A poor mother, taken with her child crushed by illness, had just arrived. She was on edge. She had had a hard time, she said, parking to get to the building. Her child, sick, was slumped on her shoulders, like a kind of rock she carried at arm’s length.
With all that, she was late for her appointment. A lot. The doctor, if I understood correctly, was now occupied elsewhere. The mother was indignant. For two days she had waited in vain, at the hospital as elsewhere. Papers had been lost. The child, in short, was no better. And the mother ran into a wall.
The secretary tried to temporize. The mother got angry. So that in no time, the scene had all the elements of a confrontation. A referee would have been hard pressed to know on which side the wrongs should be distributed. In fact, a system overwhelmed the whole situation, the mother as well as the secretary.
We lack nothing. Except apparently the essential. How else can we explain that a society that consumes and spends so much continues to suffer the repercussions of a sick and underfunded health system?
In these times when inflation is suffocating us, we continue, however, as Christmas approaches, to rush to store shelves and increase our online purchases. Every year, we consume the equivalent of billions of dollars worth of goods in this way. Computers, phones, video games, whatever you want. Money flows freely in the wide rivers of uselessness.
However, here we are entangled in a gangrenous, ramshackle, out of breath, moth-eaten, chewed up healthcare system ad infinitum by a series of reforms that have only succeeded, for years, in abusing it more, in the name of the logic of the market and simple facelifts.
In health, the great promises of the Rochon, Couillard and Barrette reforms, to name a few, have not come to fruition. We are well and truly reduced to indulging in hide-and-seek operations in public hospitals and clinics. Minister Christian Dubé promised, almost a year ago already, a doctor for all. But who the hell can still believe it, when the emergency room is constantly overflowing?
It is obviously easier to talk about the use of French in hospitals, to consider this as an existential problem, rather than to hunt down, in tax havens or elsewhere, those who fail to pay their fair share society when it comes time to fund common services.
The Ministers of Health follow one another. Everyone loves these pretty speeches which allow them to show off the musculature of their mandibles. And they each offer the same frigid smiles, dressed in the same rigid ideological costumes.
It must however be believed that most of these ministers are sincere in the projection that they give us of their illusions. However, when we see the outcome of their dreams, our hospital nightmares are self-explanatory.
What is the new hobby of the national-conservative government of François Legault in terms of health? Decentralization. This follows, of course, the centralization proposed by the previous reform led by a former caquist, which reacted to a prior effort of decentralization! The case turns in circles.
If time does not help things, they will end up fixing things, said Réjean Ducharme. Perhaps it is high time to channel our resources towards the essential, before everything swallows us up.