I met Marie-Claire Blais many years ago, when we were both students in summer courses at Laval University, where a professor from Belgium, canon by profession, came to talk to us about Sartre. and Camus, to the great scandal of the well-meaning, relayed by the newspapers of the time. She was there, shy and silent, busy listening to the words of the one who, in the most subversive works, endeavored to capture the share of anxiety and humanity.
After class, a group of worshipers, including theater leaders, Toronto journalists and young people from all over the world, continued their discussions with the teacher by taking long walks on rue des Remparts and along the Dufferin Terrace. A sort of egregore was thus formed, animated by an absolute skepticism coupled with an equally total confidence in fate.
Marie-Claire Blais has never ceased to be this being of light attentive to the slightest signs of the human being among the most deprived. Her generosity, legendary, made her agree to take part in the interview game, which she did not particularly like, which had allowed us to see each other again on a regular basis, during the last years, in the various cities where she had stayed, to prepare for what will become The places of Marie-Claire Blais (Nota bene, 2020). May she be sincerely thanked. She comments on the main stages of her training as well as her commitment to literature.
His work, from its beginnings, amazes and seduces. Here are a few reminders, taken from my preface accompanying the recent reissue, in October 2021, ofA season in the life of Emmanuel published by Le Seuil.
A class apart
” It was yesterday. A young woman in her twenties receives the Medici Prize for A season in the life of Emmanuel, a novel published in 1966 by Grasset after having been published in Quebec the previous year. This is her third work of fiction. Already his first book, The beautiful beast, in 1959, published in Quebec and in France, was translated into English and caught the attention of a renowned American critic, Edmund Wilson: he wrote in the New Yorker that Marie-Claire Blais is a writer in a class of its own (“on her own”) And maybe a genius (“possibly a genius”). The same newspaper, a few decades later, in 2019, designates her as one of the most unique and original among contemporary fiction writers. A strange fate is that of the poet, novelist and playwright whose work is developed over time, without concessions to literary fashions, like a deaf weapon engaged in the survival of the species. An immense work, describing a world of contrasts and contradictions inhabited by characters whose anguish is coupled with an immense appetite for life.
A season in the life of Emmanuel appears in a rapidly changing Quebec that has been called the Quiet Revolution. After the traditional portraits of rural life proposed by regionalist novelists, Marie-Claire Blais rewrites the novel of the land and the parody. At the head of a line of rebels is Jean Le Maigre, “seven-year-old poet”, angel with dirty hands whose lucidity illuminates a world where death reigns as indisputably as the all-powerful grandmother Antoinette.
A multiplicity of voices
Unclassifiable, the novel intrigues critics who seek out landmarks among the great known models, from Zola to Lautréamont and Faulkner. In the light of what we know from what follows, we can only note the astonishing coherence of this approach which, from its beginnings, shatters the framework of the narrative to offer a multiplicity of voices, integrates the excluded and delegates to fictitious writers take care to question the scope of the act of writing. Choral writing, long modulated sentence, sequential structure, taking into account the marginal and staging of the writing, these elements which form the texture ofA season in the life of Emmanuel will be the foundations of the poetics of the writer as it has developed into a host of stories. Modern in form, this painting of human misery transfigured by poetry has lost nothing of its relevance.
The need to say and write
More recently, the cycle of Thirsts (1995-2018) compares, in an island that has become a microcosm of the universe, the present of consciousness and the major events that have marked the History of the last decades, each of these being reframed in the perspective of a singular destiny. Here again we find the choral writing and the expanding phrase that characterize his first texts. Alongside those left behind and even some criminals, a broad line of writers has seen the light of day, witnesses to a changing world, thirsty for justice and keeping their sights set on hope despite the cataclysms that have unfolded. strike down on humanity with the regularity of inevitable hurricanes.
From the rebellious poet ofA season in the life of Emmanuel to Daniel, the author of maturity in Thirsts, unfolds the journey of a novelist who has never ceased to claim the need to say and write. We have compared her to Virginia Woolf, Nathalie Sarraute, Elsa Morante and we have pointed out her affiliation with the great masters of Proust and Faulkner. She admits herself influenced by these authors, to which are added the names of Dostoyevsky and Kafka, but first of all in solidarity with the leading writers of Quebec literature, including Gabrielle Roy, Anne Hébert and Réjean Ducharme, her contemporaries. .
Above all, we recognize in the novelist a tone and style that are her own, imprinted with this form of empathy which makes her sensitive to the “internal language of the characters”, as she describes her research, and to their most important thoughts. secret. Without writing, the narrator of Pauline Archange manuscripts said he was risking “not having existed for anyone”. This threat, Marie-Claire Blais quickly evacuated from her life, having practiced without failing a profession that she designates in Thirsts like the “highest destiny” and exercising through her books a discreet activism which led her towards escapes of light in the heart of the disaster. “