46 years ago, on March 15, 1977, Montreal writer Hubert Aquin shot himself fatally in the forehead, at the age of 47, in the gardens of Villa Maria College, on the slopes of Mount Royal. To a confidante, the literary critic Patricia Smart, the desperate separatist had said: ” [René] Lévesque will never achieve independence; he will negotiate until the end of the world. » For his partner, Aquin calls his suicide the « positive » act « of a living person ».
Andrée Yanacopoulo, this companion, explains that after the electoral victory of the Parti Québécois in 1976, the writer “started to believe that Quebec could need him”. He was very disappointed that his services were not called upon, because, she adds, he was “ready to give himself entirely to the building of his country.” The revealing testimony is one of at least 70 texts that have appeared in the written media and reproduced in Portraits of a suicidebook by François Harvey, literary historian.
In the book, the specialist brilliantly dissects everything that, between March 16, 1977 and October 1978, relates to Aquin’s death. There is the first tribute paid, from March 17, to the writer by Jean Basile, literary critic at the Duty, with a luminous judgment on the extreme singularity of the creator: “He lived high up in a horizontal universe. »
A bias resounded, like lightning, from 1965, in next episode, a somewhat autobiographical novel of the future suicide. After the decline of the independence movement from 1995, these words acquire something prescient: “I am the fractured symbol of the Quebec revolution, but also its disordered reflection and its suicidal incarnation. Since the age of fifteen, I have not stopped wanting a beautiful suicide […] To commit suicide everywhere and relentlessly, that is my mission. »
This mission of Aquin, the Quebec novelist André Langevin will salute it the day after the tragedy, in the name of his colleagues, by declaring that it was about the “only” writer “among us to attempt such a lofty and perilous step”. Langevin will unite political conviction with literary genius by specifying that Aquin “possessed the magic of the verb best” and “that Quebec has lost its greatest writer”.
Harvey has the foresight — some will add the courage — to reveal Aquin’s paradox: the writer reconciled suicide with his Catholic faith, which nevertheless reproves him, and this faith, known to his close friends, remained for him inseparable from the identity national. But it shocked most admirers of Aquinas, supporters of secularism.
Quoting Patricia Smart, exegete and friend of the writer, Harvey insists on black snow. In this last novel (1974) by Aquinas, we read: “Let us flee to our only homeland! […] to be reborn and live in the Christ of Revelation. Didn’t Aquin aspire to a mystical Quebec?