Once a month, under the pen of Quebec writers, The duty literature proposes to revisit, in the light of current events, works from the ancient and recent past of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreading? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with The duty.
We know the immense success that maria Chapdelaine experienced in Quebec, particularly during the half-century following its publication. So what did readers of that time find there? Why this close identification with this local novel whose author was not even “one of us”? And above all, why this success with very diverse audiences in Quebec and Europe?
Here I will offer some answers. But the book continues to be read and periodically solicits filmmakers, the latest being Sébastien Pilote, who wanted to stay very close to the text and the spirit of the book. What can we say about its relevance today? How does it serve our collective imagination?
I will first show what seems to me to be inconsistencies and even implausibilities in the construction of the work. I will then try to explain why these faults did not prevent his fascinating career.
The novel contains very successful passages: the description of Laura’s death followed by the return of spring, beautiful pages on the landscapes and the seasons, the sweet melancholy that emanates from them (“the sad country without a mirage”), the Maria’s daydreams, her “secret of love”, and others. The style is usually sober, all in halftone (the evening prayer in memory of François), as if to match the simple life of the inhabitants.
But there are also improprieties, clumsiness: the “heroic forms” of Maria, the “mines of inhuman purity” of the convents of Chicoutimi, the “happy march” of the logs with the log drive… We encounter expressions unknown in the Saguenay (and in Quebec?): “Hello everyone”, “it can happen in no time”, “iron” for railway, “sugar syrup” for maple sugar…
Improbabilities
A family of settlers had to work tirelessly for thirty years to get a farm out of the forest. But Hémon informs us that this was Samuel’s sixth clearing experience. The previous times he had worked hard to build fine farms, only to immediately abandon them (to Laura’s despair) for surprisingly trivial reasons: he “hated[t] to lose his mind” these properties, he began to “hate people’s faces”.
Aberrant reasons too: he was “tired of work” – hence his repeated returns to the gentle life of clearing? These passages are surprising from an observer who has lived for more than a year in Péribonka and has been able to observe the extremely difficult work of the settlers, the insecurity and the adversity that doomed them to poverty and misery. Moreover, and in an unexpected way, Hémon faithfully describes these conditions in many places.
Other implausibilities: the wives of “typically French” settlers, as well dressed as “the young bourgeoises of France”, barns which are “falling into ruin” (in the context of clearing, of a new region), a dispute between old neighbors of “several generations”, a land cleared of its trees in a fortnight, etc.
Structural defects
There are perhaps more serious problems. First, it is strange to see François Paradis, this giant of the New World intoxicated with wide open spaces, this man “of the great woods” of the caliber of the “Savages”, suddenly destined for agriculture. How to imagine him trotting behind the plough, fixing his fences, debating the care of the cows at the agricultural cooperative, chopping his firewood under the dreamy eye of Maria? Or again: intervening in the bickering of the municipal council, wisely attending church on Sundays—becoming a churchwarden perhaps?
Hémon was heading towards a dead end; François, this giant, had to disappear. Certainly, his death was not that of a farmer: alone in the forest, struggling against the onslaught of a furious storm and bowing after a titanic confrontation. Fine, but where was he headed? Was he chasing, starving, at the end of his tether, a herd of caribou? Was he going to join a young Savagesse on the borders of the Far North? No: he was going wisely to find a future wife in a land of shadows.
It is no less strange to see Maria reject Lorenzo Surprenant in favor of Eutrope Gagnon. According to the widespread logic among French-Canadian rural people of the time, Maria should have opted for the good life that Lorenzo promised her. The United States then exerted an extraordinary fascination on French Canadians (nearly a million emigrated there between 1830 and 1930) as well as on Europeans. The miserable life of the clearings also militated in favor of this choice.
As I pointed out, Hémon himself devoted convincing pages to the subject, pages which provided excellent reasons for fleeing this kind of life. One thinks, among other things, of the very realistic pleas that Surprenant addresses to Maria, who moreover allows herself to be convinced and makes very disillusioned reflections on life in the wasteland: “barbaric country”, “where women suffered and were slowly dying », without help, etc.
Last example. From the Quebec point of view, will we believe that what made the hearts of the pioneer settlers beat was the cult of a very distant, imperishable, sacred French memory that had to be perpetuated at all costs? The memory of France certainly survived among these inhabitants, but did not frequenting the “new” continent for three centuries leave an original, intense legacy, a legacy of work and dreams, of struggles and solidarity? feeding another memory, more vivid perhaps?
“Since the priest had said so…”
Added to all this is an astonishing reversal provoked by the word of the priest (the “priest’s song”). Devastated after the tragic death of her lover, Maria is told, in connection with her passion and the despair she feels, that she is “grieving herself without reason”, that she is committing a sin in being so desolate (“the God doesn’t like that”), that she is very wrong to “let herself suffer because of a boy who doesn’t [lui] was nothing”. Raising no protest, Maria then frees herself, with surprising ease, from the deep grief that was gnawing at her. Suddenly, “he had no more love left.”
This spectacular reversal, shipped in two pages, is highly unlikely. To cushion the fall between the flame that François had lit and the friendship of convenience for the very insipid Eutrope, Hémon found nothing better than the banal, authoritarian words of the priest. At the same time, the main tension which up to then had sustained the novel disappears. It is replaced by a long, rather flat discourse on what the author now presents as the splendors of life among the stumps (“a blessed permission”). The religious now takes precedence over the great passion of love and the exoticism of the new country.
One would think that Hémon, the libertarian, yielded to the censorship which then weighed on our literature, strangely conferring on his novel a structure that Maurice Lemire has described well in many French-Canadian authors: a narrative initially conducted quite freely which then bends to win the approval of the censors.
Three badly welded novels?
This plot twist suggests that there are three novels in this novel. And I would be tempted to add: three badly welded novels. Curiously, everyone benefited from it. The public of old Europe could dream while communing with the mystique of the New World. French readers were flattered to learn that their homeland survived and stretched to the ends of America forever, because nothing would ever change: the heritage of the bet mother had remained intact, the settlers hadn’t forgotten anything.
Finally, our conservative elites, clergy in the lead, could see in the novel the vibrant testimony of a very pious destiny rooted in rurality and of an unconditional submission to the Church. The novel became a profoundly Catholic manifesto, in perfect conformity with the discourse of Survival. Hémon, unwittingly perhaps, fleshed out this interpretation in various ways, for example by refraining from evoking the very modern pulp factory which had just come into operation in Péribonka itself and which was the pride of the settlers.
Let’s go back to the initial question: what is the enormous success of this book due to, given the weaknesses pointed out? In addition to the triple reading to which it lent itself, the novel offered an element of novelty by avoiding simplistic lyricism. In addition, the work is undoubtedly served by successful stylistic effects. Add to that an original love story in a “wild” environment which offered the reader dream material amplified by Maria’s intense and secret character.
That said, I insist on the hybrid character of the novel which lent itself to different readings according to the sensibility, the imagination and the ideology of the reader.
Is this novel still relevant? We can doubt it. Its main springs have become anachronistic. The traditional epic of colonization is worn out, just like the discourse of Survival and the transcendent word of the priest. As for the vision of Quebec as a “cousin” or as a reproduction of France in America, it was swept away by the redefinitions following the Quiet Revolution.
There remains a beautiful love story, which is not nothing. But apparently, it was not enough to ensure the beautiful film by Sébastien Pilote all the success it deserved.