“One day, I realized that I was not an outsider, but that I had been marginalized. These words of Pierre Falardeau, in 1998, in a conference, went straight to the heart of the apprentice sociologist Jean-Philippe Pleau. “He had just put his finger on what irritated me in our society, me, the young citizen in training: that is to say the fact that freedom of thought has a price, that of ostracism from good society. »
“I would have liked to be Pierre Falardeau’s friend,” writes Pleau in his essay entitled In the time of hurried thought. I would have liked him not to die in 2009.” He insists on this, even if, working at Radio-Canada since 2005, he will co-host from 2014 to 2021 the radio program It’s crazy… with anthropologist and broadcaster Serge Bouchard (1947-2021). The essayist recalls the friendship which bound him to Bouchard, although the thought of the latter differed from that of Falardeau. This difference sheds light on Pleau’s essay.
Prefaced by Micheline Lanctôt, his collaborator at think about voice high — the weekly radio program he hosts on ICI Radio-Canada Première — the book intends to “refuse the compression of ideas and choose the deep dynamics of reflection”. Moreover, most of the texts come from the show.
Liberating poetry
The essayist Pleau writes that Falardeau had an overflowing admiration for the ideas of Quebec poet Gaston Miron (1928-1996). Like Pleau and Bouchard, Miron came from an underprivileged background. And he thought of poetry as the collective way necessary for the radical change of this alienating environment. “The poem, he said, can only be done / against the non-poem”, because “the poem is transcendence / in the homogeneity of a people who liberate / its inert duration kept walled in. »
Pleau also says that Bouchard’s parents “had a plan for emancipation” for their children, which was never the case in his own family. “Your father is illiterate, your mother has received little education,” Bouchard told him, but, like a good anthropologist, he urged him to save them from oblivion. This was all the more urgent as Pleau recognized himself as “an immigrant from within”, a “class defector”, since he admitted to having “lost his native language” in a “Radio-Canada studio in strength to work on varnishing it”.
Following Miron, so dear to Falardeau, Pleau begins to guess that intuition and poetry express the idea of national liberation better than sociology and anthropology, especially when they derive from popular genius. Less lofty and less tragic than the literary art of Jacques Ferron and Hubert Aquin, poetry, when it draws on oral tradition, has the irreplaceable advantage of moving the people by giving freedom a concrete face.