The Quebec essayist Yan Hamel expresses in verse the strangeness of the culture shock that Paris provokes among his people: “in the hollow of the night / you wake up / in sweat / to be ashamed / of your accent”. However, the most refined of the Parisian novelists of the XXe century staged in 1927 Canadians “perhaps unknowingly undergoing the charm of an accent so light that one does not know if it is that of old France or England”.
These little-known words by Marcel Proust can be read in “Time Regained”, the last part ofIn search of time lost. They decide on the idea of ”the incorrigible mediocrity raging in our Belle Province” that Hamel expresses after the in-depth analysis he makes of the Parisian experience of the characters of several Quebec novels in his essay. Paris in piecesinterspersed with poems and photos of his own.
From 1961 to 2014, works by novelists such as Jacques Godbout, Anne Hébert, Marie-Claire Blais, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Michel Tremblay and Jacques Poulin illustrate the essayist’s approach. But Hamel should have taken into account the exceptional Parisian origins of Quebec that Marcel Fournier, Quebec historian and genealogist, had assessed in 2018.
In the XVIIe and XVIIIe centuries, Parisians represent only 20% of a predominantly rural France. In New France, they exceed this proportion by five to six times. At least 900 ancestors made Paris the cultural matrix of Quebec before making it that of France, beyond the flavor of an accent.
In News from Edward, a novel by Tremblay (1984), Hamel points out that, in a Parisian café, we recognize the Quebecois accent of the hero and we admit to hating this accent. The essayist comments: “Tears well up in Édouard’s eyes. Do we at least give him the right to live? »
The great novel bibi (2009) by Victor-Lévy Beaulieu is linked to autofiction. At one point, a needy employee of Éditions Larousse in Paris, the hero is saddened to see that he cannot share his fervor for Quebec independence with the Parisians. Hamel concludes: “Bibi is never as ridiculous as when he imagines Pierre Bourgault letting the whole of Paris know, in his formidable voice as a tribune”, what a “nation” is.
We remain flabbergasted by the amused look, even if it is well documented, that the essayist casts on the malaise of so many Quebec novelists in the face of Parisian cultural superiority, which blinds them to the point of making it a secretly unattainable ideal. That the malaise is a tragedy does not seem to concern him. Among Quebec writers, Jacques Ferron had refused to go to Paris to hope for recognition. He claimed to create only for people from here. Would Hamel have understood this radical attitude?