We had known each other, rubbed shoulders with each other, appreciated each other, fought To have to during his time as editor of the newspaper. It’s not easy to be the boss, even if power has undeniable advantages. She kept a distance from the fortunes and misfortunes of the job. So, we stood up to her while respecting her. Then she went to found the Grande Bibliothèque, and one day left the helm. I ran into her again here and there with great pleasure, finding the new Lise Bissonnette charming. Relieved of many stresses, no doubt. This woman full of talents, pride, convictions, love of the arts, contradictions and a sharp will also preserves her enigmas.
So I read his book of interviews with Pascale Ryan, Lise Bissonnette (Boréal), to better understand his thinking and trace his full career. Biographies are often too intrusive for anti-human individualists. people, sheltered in their interior territory. The format of the interviews makes it possible to better identify the key themes, without revealing everything.
Childhood in Rouyn-Noranda, in a time and environment too narrow for her dreams, left her with a taste of bitterness: the Great Darkness rhymed above all for her with the whiteness of the void, “the pale tint of ignorance”. . Outside the field of the more cultivated socio-cultural elites, his cradle, like that of many compatriots, seemed to him very dull: “So much grayness was not the only fact of censorship, religious executives, political corruption under Duplessis. It was anchored, it had held for more than a century. Louis Hémon is the one, among the literary, who understood it best. Lise Bissonnette, however, ignores the poetry of the arts and popular traditions, so lively for a long time.
Because she was a pioneer in a man’s world, there is a lot of emphasis on her femininity. But the spirit flies beyond these partitions. His thought and his psyche captivate here in the first place. Intellectual! The epithet sticks to his forehead in a society that often prefers to laugh rather than cogitate. “So I have the reputation of being an intellectual. Why not, if we forget such a disjointed course. » University studies, activism in the newspaper Latin Quarterresourcing in Montreal and Paris, an immense career as a journalist then as director of the To have to and from the Grande Bibliotheque, novels, thousands of readings, a late doctorate, a shower of laurels—I’m short—have never appeased his feeling of incompleteness, which had been etched in the past. “One is from one’s childhood as one is from a country,” wrote Saint-Exupéry.
Its trajectory appears all the more fascinating in that it follows that of Quebec. Ambitions to grow, to learn, to assert themselves found an individual and collective springboard under the glare of the Quiet Revolution. Soon separatist, the young lady dreamed of a more egalitarian Quebec, open to all lights. The exhilaration of the liberation will give way to a feeling of pride as well as several disappointments in the face of the unfinished canvas. Burning in her, “this terrible failure of the supposed “educational renewal” adopted by the State twenty years ago, which made knowledge a suspect notion within Quebec schools”.
The lasting lack of culture in the education system in Quebec afflicts him. And, faced with the failure of methods that have trained too many functional illiterates and ignorant people of all stripes who lose their language in passing, who would dare to contradict this pedagogue passionate about education?
Where is journalism going? wonders the one who will have practiced it from the news to the report, from the editorial to the chronicle. Today, she appreciates the quality of more numerous analytical texts than yesterday in the media. But the triviality of the variety shows that arise in the forums of the behavior of elected officials, the need to make room for laughter in each exchange, in his eyes, this casts too much shadow on rigorous information. social media too, misleads minds and destabilizes the profession.
The adventure of the Grande Bibliothèque, initially strewn with pitfalls, which became the triumph of a temple of knowledge, discussions and “wooden rooms”, remains for Lise Bissonnette the main legacy of her life. Even if all the institutions in motion are deteriorating on certain levels.
In the space of a life as active as his, Quebec has made eight revolutions on itself, and the planet to match. His analyzes of society prove to be more valuable. This collection of interviews interested me all the more because I shared many of his questions. Visionaries once had the impulse to elevate the spirit of Quebecers very high. Why have over the years allowed this momentum to weaken?