Some authors seem immortal, others sink into oblivion. After a while, what’s left? In its monthly series Should we reread…?, The duty revisits one of these writers with the help of attentive admirers and observers. As for Émile Nelligan (1879-1941), in more than a century, he never disappeared from the cultural landscape. On the other hand, at the dawn of a brilliant literary career, he saw his fragile personality, as well as his stifling family environment dominated by a father who had no use for a poet son, cause his downfall.
When hearing his name, many people might say that “the snow has snowed” (taken from Winter evening) or that a ship “sank into the abyss of the dream” (taken from Golden Vessel). Others have a vague idea of his tragic destiny, that of a young writer nourished by the poetry of Verlaine, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, but whose wings would be clipped before the age of 20. Interned on August 9, 1899 at the Saint-Benoît-Joseph-Labre rest home, he was then transferred to the Saint-Jean-de-Dieu hospital in 1925, a year after the death of his father, David Nelligan, an Irish immigrant.
It was said of the young poet that he bore his father’s name, but that he cherished the sensitivity and taste for literature inherited from his mother, Émélie Amanda Hudon, originally from Rimouski. Émile Nelligan also chose to speak and write in his mother tongue, the first in a series of affronts to his father. The latter could not stand his propensity for daydreaming and his visceral boredom with anything that took him away from writing.
Although the boy was born on December 24, 1879 in Montreal, the poet’s birth was encouraged by the École littéraire de Montréal, a group of young artists founded in 1895 and of which he became a member in 1897. He considered it his true school, unable to adapt to the academic demands of Mont-Saint-Louis College, Montreal College or Sainte-Marie College.
It was at the Château Ramezay, during an evening organized by the Literary School of Montreal, that the poet was truly born. On May 26, 1899, he recited The talisman, Artist’s dreamAnd The romance of wine (“I’m gay! I’m gay! Long live wine and Art!… / I have the dream of also writing famous verses / Verses that will moan funeral music / Of the distant autumn winds passing through the fog”), the latter earning him, according to legend, a triumph. This euphoria will be short-lived since the same year, no longer able to bear his indiscipline and his mystical delusions (he allowed himself to be locked in chapels during the night), David Nelligan takes him away from his family and the rest forever. of the world.
This confinement would be described as a death sentence by Louis Dantin, a key figure in Nelligan’s life and work, and to whom Quebec literature had contracted a significant debt. This friend of the poet, a not very orthodox Catholic priest later forced into exile, did much to bring together his work, which had until then been scattered across newspapers and magazines. In a preface that would help to forge Nelligan’s reputation, Dantin (real name Eugène Seers) announced from the outset that the poet “was dead”. However, at the time of the publication of this first collection published in 1904, Nelligan was very much alive, which the preface writer amply emphasizes, but on the fringes of a society that did not yet know that it would make him a myth.
“Without Louis Dantin’s editing work, Nelligan would have been completely forgotten,” says Claude La Charité, professor in the Department of Letters and Humanities at the Université du Québec à Rimouski. “He chose the poems, made corrections, but contrary to what some claim, he is not the author. Moreover, when he published Crusoe’s box (1932), we can clearly see that Dantin has much less talent than Nelligan. On the other hand, his literary critiques are always perfectly finished,” recalls this specialist in 19th-century Quebec literary history.e century.
In addition to giving him an influence never before known to the poet when he still lived with his family on rue Laval, Louis Dantin would define the way in which Nelligan would be approached for several decades. “He played the role of mentor, then of conduit, according to Pascal Brissette, professor in the Department of French-language literature, translation and creation at McGill University. For almost half a century, we no longer knew how to speak otherwise about Nelligan, until Luc Lacourcière, a professor at Laval University, proposed a complete work in 1952 in Fides, and elaborated it in a manner scientist. » Because Dantin had not published all of his work, certain poems had been excluded, others scattered, not to mention the poems written under assumed names, including Émile Kovar.
The poet of rupture
The ways of treating Nelligan’s life and work will be multiple from the Quiet Revolution onwards, but the poet had, in his time, also carried out a small revolution. Its references, French, but also American (including Edgar Allan Poe), are certainly identifiable, but its singularity still remained evident, both aesthetically and thematically.
“Unlike the poets Louis Fréchette (1839-1908) and Octave Crémazie (1827-1879), Émile Nelligan was not at all driven by French-Canadian patriotism,” says Claude La Charité, himself a writer (The hermit’s eye). He aspires to something universal, and reading him in translation, one would probably have difficulty recognizing that he is French-speaking. Winter evening gives the impression of having been written by a Russian or a Scandinavian. »
Over the decades, this singularity failed to convince everyone, with many reducing Nelligan’s work to that of a plagiarist… of talent. Pascal Brissette, author of the essay Nelligan in all its statesrefuses. “He is part of this great line of cursed poets. No, he does not just copy Verlaine or Rimbaud, he is inspired by them, and renews the literature of his time. Moreover, the publication of Nelligan’s first collection represents the symbol of the first stone of modern Quebec literature.”
Until his death in 1941, admirers visited him hoping for new poems, or to hear him recite his most famous ones. In the second half of the 20th centurye century, another renaissance was possible for Nelligan. He was the subject of biographies and analyzes which put his work into perspective, thanks among others to Paul Wyczynski (Emile Nelligan. Biography) and Jean Larose (The myth of Nelligan). The greatest performers (Monique Leyrac, Claude Léveillée, Claude Dubois) sang his poems, and the writer’s life became an opera signed Michel Tremblay and André Gagnon, created 35 years ago and revisited many times since. “Nelligan’s work not only has historical value, but other lenses have been applied to it since the Quiet Revolution. And when great cultural figures appropriate it, it adds to its legitimacy,” explains Pascal Brissette.
The myth more accessible than the work
After working as a music teacher for 15 years and returning to university in translation, Geneviève Breton reconnected with the pleasure of transmission. She designed maprofdefrançais, a platform “for learning Quebecois”, offering fun and diverse content to immigrants wanting to learn about the language and culture here. In one of her capsules, she introduces Émile Nelligan through winter evening“that everyone in [son] entourage knew”.
“It wasn’t a great success,” admits the teacher who is active on YouTube. “Even if I’m not very sensitive to poetry, I can recognize Nelligan’s talent, her musicality, her mastery. If I use poetry again, I will go towards works with a greater social resonance, such as Speak White, by Michèle Lalonde, or the poems of Gérald Godin, very inspired by popular language. »
Claude La Charité also feels this relative interest in his classes. “There are 20-year-olds who recognize themselves in it, as I recognized myself when I discovered it as a teenager, a reading that changed my life. It’s not scientific, but I feel that at least a third of my students are impervious to it, not to say confused.” And while the generalized deficit of attention could favor poetry rather than the novel, Geneviève Breton is not so convinced, because “the real issue around a text is not its length, but its density.”
As for Nelligan’s poetry, not only is it dense, but also prophetic, and not only in The Golden Ship. Didn’t he write in Dream of a hospital night : “And I want to return to the next recital / Which she must give me to the planetary country / When the angels have taken me out of the hospital. »