Once a month, from the pens of writers from Quebec, The duty of literature proposes to revisit in the light of current events works from the ancient and recent past of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreadings? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec, in collaboration with The duty.
“In the beginning, he was alone on the island”: the first sentence of Jacques Poulin’s novel, High tides, first published in 1978, is as simple as it is rich in mystery and mythic power. Is the stranger who looms from the outset a new Robinson Crusoe doomed to an autarkic existence after being shipwrecked on a desert island? We will quickly learn that this is not the case. This antihero designated only by the “code name” of Teddy Bear, translator of comic strips at the newspaper The sun from Quebec, instead obtained from his rich boss the chance to establish himself alone on Île Madame, located not far from Île d’Orléans and uninhabited since the retirement of his old guardian.
Few people today would like to relive the experience of Robinson Crusoe, although the short and supervised experiences of survival in isolated territory (we think of Survivor Quebec) are enjoying media popularity or are readily practiced in personal growth groups. The island experience is often an ordeal, sometimes even a nightmare. Literature, from Homer to Michel Houellebecq via Rabelais and Jonathan Swift, has readily represented islands as reserves of strangeness that are not always hospitable: they can shelter monsters, peoples with unusual or grotesque customs, sects of ‘illuminated.
It is true that, conversely, the utopian projects of ideal societies like the island enclosure, such as the island of Utopia designed during the Renaissance by Thomas More. Heirs of romantic individualism, we are undoubtedly more attracted today, as Teddy Bear is, by the mythical figure of the island refuge, a haven of peace and silence, providing a beneficial agreement with ourselves and with nature. Even without knowing it, a bit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau lives in us, installed for a moment sheltered from the social tumult on the island of Saint-Pierre, in the middle of a Swiss lake. An ideal place for voluntary simplicity, the island where one would live alone would allow one to simply feel that they exist, in complete asociality.
A benevolent capitalist
The central character of Jacques Poulin’s novel indulges this fantasy all the better since he seems to have little talent for social relationships, his work as a translator imposes solitude and, moreover, the man is a “maniac of precision”, a perfectionist who has trouble putting up with messy gestures and sloppy executions in others. However, Teddy Bear is lucky to have a boss who seems to care about his happiness and who can satisfy his desire immediately.
The ability to own an entire island is a luxury that few people can afford. A few years ago, the newspaper The sun headlined that Île au Ruau, neighboring Île Madame and present in Poulin’s novel, was for sale for 5 million dollars! The novel does not tell us if Teddy’s boss paid this price for Madame Island, but one thing is certain, he does not lack resources and when, later in the novel, he mentions his own success, we recognize in him a lookalike of Paul Desmarais Sr., one of the richest and most powerful men Canada has known, born in Sudbury and became the big boss of Power Corporation, a pulp and paper magnate and a newspaper owner, of which The Press in Montreal and, precisely, The sun from Quebec.
At the beginning, therefore, Teddy walks peacefully on the flats of Madame Island, alone but still accompanied by his old cat Matousalem. This will not last and we understand that the myth of the idyllic island will have been brandished at the start only to be better deconstructed. Why is that ? First, if making people happy is a laudable endeavor, you still have to listen to them. However, the rich boss does not listen: from the start, he insists on bringing a pet cat to Matousalem, against Teddy’s clear advice.
This is just the beginning: arriving every Saturday by helicopter to collect the translations while bringing food and new comics to translate, the boss soon brings in a young woman, Marie, who will all the same be an accomplice. and a loving confidante to Teddy. The arrivals who follow will be much more disturbing: Happy Head, the boss’s wife, is frivolous, blundering, and an insidious seductress; the Author, crude and messy, dreams of writing “the great novel of America”; Professor Moccasin is as deaf and unpredictable as Professor Tournesol from Tintin; the Common Man appears out of nowhere to take care of material problems and the well-being of the community; finally, the Social Animator imposes himself in a small, increasingly dysfunctional society at the same time as he makes life impossible for a man who only asked for solitude and peace.
Over the course of these arrivals, Jacques Poulin’s novel therefore becomes the opposite of Thomas More’s utopias, which offer a model of a better and ideally harmonious society. Professor Mocassin’s deafness is only the extreme case of generalized deafness: misunderstandings, incomprehensions and communication errors multiply in a microsociety which is, we must not forget, the product of a capitalist “generous”, a merchant of happiness who not only wants to respond to all the needs of individuals, but also to the needs they do not have.
Considered in this light, Teddy is the naive victim of a poisoned chalice. The author of High tides makes us identify with the translator, to the point where it is a bit like our own dream of a desert island that we see little by little crumbling. No doubt this sympathy is also due to the fact that Jacques Poulin put a lot of himself into his character.
Born in 1937, originally from Beauceron and settled in Quebec after a long stay in Paris, Poulin is one of the most discreet writers in Quebec literature, resistant to social and media effervescence, entirely devoted to his routine of solitary writer. His novels, such The heart of the blue whale, Volkswagen blues or The old sorroware jewels of precision, delicacy, presence to beings and the territory they inhabit.
Passive resistance
The figure of the social misfit haunts Jacques Poulin and it is revealing that the fantasy of the desert island here nourishes the eminently current story of an invaded territory. Never has the question of habitable spaces, their sharing and their development been so burning, against a backdrop of housing crisis, wild evictions, “not-in-my-yard” syndromes, noise pollution and atmospheric, etc. We may count on “islands” of tranquility and greenery, but our developed, hectic, noisy society, overloaded with vehicles and consumer products, poses an enormous challenge to the desire for isolation and simplicity that all Teddy can nourish. Bear of this world.
Faced with this resurgence of a social tumult that he fled, does the translator have any other weapon than that of passive resistance, one of the modest powers that literature itself has? With Marie and their two cats (because she also has one), Teddy copes as best he can with this neighborhood that he did not want, he does not ask questions or think of leaving, he is not indignant nor rebels. His very work as a translator, an incessant quest for precision and accuracy, is a form of refusal of the ambient nonsense.
The couple that Teddy forms with Marie obeys in every way this ethic marked by non-violence, slowness, respect and attention. Even sexuality finds its place between them only with infinite restraint. This caring, disciplined life has a kind of formal dignity which is accomplished par excellence in the sport that Teddy practices.
In the center of the island in fact there is a tennis court. This court is a sort of island within the island, a perfectly delimited space which obeys clear rules and which requires a technique incompatible with disorderly gestures and loss of control. Teddy’s perfectionism finds an ideal space in the practice of tennis: his preparation is solemn, his dress impeccable, the swings of the solitary player are studied, ample, never rushed. What emerges from this is that true insularity is first and foremost mental: an interior island created by stripping, concentration, the repeated practice of rituals, the modest aspiration for a certain beauty, even if simply that of the fluid gesture.
However, the tennis court is gradually being distorted and degraded by the small community on the island. However, the irony is that Teddy, an inveterate loner, was playing against a robot, the Prince, a beautiful and formidable machine randomly programmed to offer increasing challenges to his opponent. As soon as he arrived on the island, the man of voluntary simplicity had nothing but admiration for this robot placed there as if by the hand of God.
Could it be that his perfectionism has made him not only resistant to life in society, but blind to what is dehumanizing in the growing and almost hypnotizing power of technology? Does he even suspect that another robot could do his translations well? Written before personal computers, the Internet and artificial intelligence, Poulin’s novel opens up, here again, surprisingly current perspectives.
Despite the irony and the funny episodes, the drama remains none the less and it gets worse. As society invades his island, Teddy loses his means: he gets old, he gets cold, he becomes so stiff that he can no longer play tennis. We remember that on the first page, he was walking alone on the flats with his cat. The happiness of the desert island did not last long.