On July 10, 1965, shortly after the release of his most famous novel, A season in the life of Emmanuel, here is what the critic Jean Éthier-Blais (not related to her) wrote in The duty : “Marie-Claire Blais, it’s not fake or posing, and when she goes down the stairs leading to the tomb of life and love, it’s with a firm footing, like a condemned man who knows exactly where he is going. She does not enter the horror universe that is hers with her eyes closed. This is what makes it great and this is what it will last. He didn’t believe he was saying so well. Of all the major writers of the Quiet Revolution, she is the only one who has renewed herself to the point of embodying the literature of today, as if she had remained eternally young, indefatigable, always carried by the energy of the beginning.
This energy perhaps explains why Marie-Claire Blais’ sentences, especially in her latest style, never stop, endlessly relaunched, refusing the usual breaks of paragraphs and dots. Or why his novels themselves have become unfinished since the beginning of the cycle of Thirsts (1995), first triptych, then cathedral of ten novels (nearly 3000 pages in all), and still recently enlarged, veritable Sagrada familia from America, with an eleventh novel, Little Ashes or the Capture (2020), centered on one of the 200 or so “main” characters who inhabit the universe of Thirsts, the eternal “night watchman” of the “Saloon Porte du Baiser”.
Night porter, Marie-Claire Blais has always been. It has been said a lot that she has retained, even at over 80 years of age, the ardor and daring of youth. It has been emphasized less that, from his first book, The beautiful beast, written at the age of 19, she revealed herself to be surprisingly mature, immediately sure of her vocation, not so much of her talent as of her passion for literature, for art in general and above all for what she will soon call the choir of distant miseries. She has always been convinced that it is by plunging into the darkness and chaos of the world that light emerges.
A few years ago, we found an exchange of letters between the young Marie-Claire Blais and another high-profile critic of the time, Gilles Marcotte. The latter had said a lot of good about The beautiful beast and he was therefore entitled to a letter of thanks from Marie-Claire Blais. But she should not be counted on to play the game of deference. The writer, who is often portrayed as shy and withdrawn, quickly gets down to business, and turns the tables. She begins by emphasizing how much her elder brother has found the right tone: “Your review on The beautiful beast is a real little masterpiece of sweetness. The praise is not free: gentleness, this will perhaps be the most accurate term to describe Marie-Claire Blais’ unique voice, between whisper and song, a gentleness maintained even in the face of the worst human abominations, the contrary to sentimentality, so much does it carry the awareness of evil within itself. Behind this stubborn gentleness looms a strength, a daring and a revolt that never wavers.
In the same letter to Gilles Marcotte, Marie-Claire Blais particularly appreciates the fact that the critic saw that through the plunge into the sadistic and suicidal rebellion of Isabelle-Marie there was much more than miserability. She takes it up on her own and underlines the words of the critic: “As if life had to destroy itself in order to save itself and deny itself in bodies in order to assert itself in souls. This has already been summed up her whole philosophy of writing, but also her so demanding way of becoming one with the world that she describes with empathy. The more one reads his letter, the more one is dazzled by the strange beauty of his formulas: “You ‘see with me the light that springs from these corpses. “It is no longer the experienced critic who lavishes his lessons on the budding writer: it is she, the young novelist, who explains, with her natural gentleness, what the courage to look monsters in the face consists of:” monstrosity is beautiful under its mask of darkness, under its knife-like heart. And if the monstrosity has no hidden beauty… really man does not need to live ”. Then she concludes her letter not by thanking the great critic, as the conventions would require. She congratulates him: “I’m proud of you,” she said to him, as if it was she who handed out the points at the end.
Shortly after, Marie-Claire Blais will receive all kinds of compliments from the great American critic Edmund Wilson, who will take her under his wing and recklessly allow himself to lavish this advice on her, like a teacher to his pupil: “It must be tighter. . […]. Tighten more, the flow is not directed enough. Until her death, she will have done exactly the opposite of what she was told to do, to our greatest happiness.