Once a month, under the pen of Quebec writers, Le Devoir de literature offers to revisit, in the light of current events, the works of ancient and recent history of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreading? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with The duty.
Last December, the report of the Commission on life care informed us that 5% of Quebecers who died in 2021-2022 had taken advantage of medical assistance in dying, an increase of 1.7% compared to the previous assessment (2020-2021). When we compare Quebec to other societies that have adopted similar legislation, more people here would opt for this controlled death. President of the Commission, Doctor Michel Bureau considered that it should be seen as a “broad social consensus”, an approach “in line with the values and expectations of Quebecers”.
These numbers brought me back to There lyrical generationa landmark essay published in 1992, by François Ricard, a great specialist in Gabrielle Roy and Milan Kundera, who died suddenly last year.
Last February, the government presented a bill that provides for an expansion of medical assistance in dying for Quebecers suffering from a “serious and incurable neuromotor handicap”. Minister Sonia Bélanger and the defenders of Bill 11 are trying to reassure us, even to play down what remains, whatever one may say, a mild and rigorously regulated form of euthanasia.
Among the few academics to have looked into the ethical scope of the bill, Jocelyn Maclure and Isabelle Dumont are categorical: this expanded access to medical assistance in dying would have nothing to do with a “denial of death”, but would rather testify to a legitimate “will of the Moderns to extend their mastery over nature and their destiny”. Choosing one’s life, regardless of one’s social or ethnocultural origins, one’s religious beliefs, one’s gender or one’s sexual orientation, was indeed the great ambition of the Moderns. But here we are approaching a new horizon: choosing one’s death.
This is obviously not to attribute to the defenders of the bill some underhanded or unacknowledged intention. There is no doubt that once adopted, the law will reduce the suffering of people stricken by terrible diseases in the face of which medical science is still powerless.
But questions remain: does this expansion of medical assistance in dying herald other relaxations? Why restrict this “end-of-life care” to the most serious and incurable illnesses, to the most extreme cases? Why not have the right to choose the type of death we want? Why establish limits, and in the name of what norms or values?
A generation blessed by history
With clear and elegant writing, free of jargon and abstruse concepts, The lyrical generation sought to account for the psychology, the spirit, the mentality, that is to say the soul of the “first-born” of the baby boom, born between the end of the Second World War and the early 1950s. Informed of the work of sociologists, demographers and historians – he had been co-author of the second volume of theHistory of contemporary Quebec (Boréal, 1989) —, Ricard had resorted to the eclectic methods of literature to grasp from the inside the dreams and aspirations of a group of men and women who, strong in their number, have profoundly marked the mind of a whole era.
This choice of the essay showed a critique of historical reason which often analyzes overhead and with detachment data which, put end to end, offers an impression of distance and objectivity. If he had preferred literature to the social sciences, it was because, a child of the lyrical generation, Ricard wanted his book to be read as a confession, a sort of self-portrait, but collective.
This generation, Ricard had described it as “lyrical”. She was born and raised in a world marked by the end of deprivation and war. His birth took on all the appearance of a great new beginning. Her parents expected of her a new world, regenerated, relieved of the heaviness of traditions and old responsibilities which had imposed a certain order of things. These children, numerous, could shape the world in their image, which should bend to their desires and their ambitions.
It was to serve this generation that the “frustrated reformers” of the 1950s, silenced by the Union Nationale regime, implemented the major reforms of the Quiet Revolution, particularly in the education sector. If the democratization of education was the order of the day, if personalist thinkers dreamed of radically transforming pedagogy, the lyrical generation was able to inherit the old humanist background of the classical colleges, but without the austere, rigid, brittle aspect of the old regime.
Arrived at the university, the lyrical generation challenged the established order, but without inventing new ideologies. She did not invent modernity, she radicalized it. Some have been Marxists or Maoists; the others advocated an unprecedented form of hedonism; still others, followers of the counter-culture, adhered to all the artistic “avant-gardes” and contributed to the discredit of the works of the past.
It was time for protest, for transgression, for rock concerts, for festive demonstrations, but often without object, in a word, for the uncompromising refusal of all legacies. “Knowing that they are the carriers of the future, writes Ricard, convinced of embodying what the world has that is best and most precious, not for a moment do these young people doubt the value or the legitimacy of their interventions or their projects . »
A new relationship to politics
The world of work did not impose heavy constraints on them. The jobs created by the welfare state were plentiful, easy to obtain, and well protected by generous collective agreements. The State of Quebec created by the quiet revolutionaries was to embody the aspirations of a people, to inspire a certain collective greatness, in a word, to offer, after the eclipse of the Church, a new form of transcendence.
Hostile to all limits, the lyrical generation would pervert the relationship to politics, “desacralize” it, by making the State an immense machine of services supposed to provide for essential needs, thus allowing the lyrical generation to rid itself of heavy tasks. which used to be the responsibility of adults: educating one’s children has become the business of teachers and psychoeducators; caring for their aging parents, that of hospital and CHSLD attendants.
By becoming a “public extension of private affairs”, our national state would have become “managerial”, “therapeutic”. As shown by the announcement of the umpteenth reform of health services announced recently, we ask our political class less to outline great prospects for the future than to manage services and administer collective agreements. In a world dominated by television, advertising and consumption, this desacralization of politics, Ricard believed, would have played into the hands of a liberal capitalism based on the satisfaction of desires and the hegemony of the present.
The people of the lyrical generation do not appreciate being addressed as you or being treated with the regard and respect that young people traditionally had for “elders”. It’s that they may have lost their hair and have aged, but they have a hard time accepting that they have become old and sometimes a little overwhelmed by the frenzy of changes dictated by the market and ideologies. of the day. Their relationship with Generation X, made up of their younger siblings or their children brought up as best they could after the first (or second) divorce, was not easy, but they applauded the great protest of 2012. Finally, “real” young people took over!
Stay young at all costs
This is because the lyrical generation wanted to embody eternal youth; his refusal to age branded his imagination and his spirit. Sports activities, hair transplants, cosmetic surgeries, makeover repeatedly, love at first sight for much younger women, everything to stay young, beautiful, fashionable.
Unfortunately, the grim reaper has begun to strike and the hour of departure is approaching. The lyrical generation will soon be over 80 years old. How to approach this last straight line? For people who have constantly bent reality to their desires, refused fatalism and resignation, how to face death?
In Barbarian invasions (2003), Denys Arcand presented us with the dream death of many members of the opera generation. Reconcile with his sometimes neglected children, make peace with an abandoned first wife, see his best friends around a large table, smoke a joint in front of a campfire and have a laugh, then, on the balcony of a beautiful chalet in the Eastern Townships, say hello to everyone one last time and take your last breath to the tune of a song by Françoise Hardy. The anguish of death, the lyrical generation will want to flee it, as it has often fled the tragedy of life.
“We can foresee, wrote Ricard 30 years ago, as the progress of euthanasia and the right to painless suicide suggest, that the ways of dying will become more gentle. Thus will perhaps be overcome the ultimate servitude with regard to the world, which was the obligation to assume the heaviness of physical suffering and agony. »
Doesn’t this “end-of-life care” provided by medical assistance in dying herald a lyrical death?