During the summer, “Le Duty» crisscrosses the waters of the St. Lawrence River, this giant “almost ocean, almost Atlantic” that Charlebois sings. Today, a ride on the back of words, those of writers, who found inspiration there.
My river is the one I pass by when I walk on the Promenade Samuel-de-Champlain in Quebec, and which, each spring, swollen, traversed by lines of foam, makes me dream of the sea. that I walk along when I go to Percé every summer. I see it all along the road changing color and mood.
Near Kamouraska, here it is in pure indigo that goes perfectly with the vibrant yellow of the rapeseed fields in bloom. In Baie-des-Sables, the water and the sky are so the same faded gray that they merge and the little white boat in the distance seems to be weightless. Past Sainte-Anne-des-Monts, it is now a deep, dark, almost black Prussian blue. The waves, hitting the tip of the rocks, cause fountain jets to appear for a moment. At Mont-Saint-Pierre, when it is now more sea than river, the wave, languid, forms only a thin hem, a small lip which, on touching the sand, gives it like a kiss and withdraws in articulating long hisses.
But my river is also that of writers.
Pierre Perrault said: “There is no river without writing. » (The big look, ONF, 1985) For him, the first to have given existence to the St. Lawrence River in writing was Jacques Cartier. He was convinced that the Malouin had written “the most beautiful poem on the river”. But Perrault was sorry that he had not had many successors.
Three and a half centuries after Cartier, Arthur Buies asked himself: “But where are the poets of the Saint-Laurent? (Vincent Lambert, The epic of too much great river. The St. Lawrence in Quebec literature). The fact is that many poets, before and after him, felt overwhelmed by the subject and gave up. Buies thought that “the St. Lawrence does not lend itself to poetry”. In agreement with “most of his contemporaries, Buies represents the river as a colossal, wild being, unsuited to the outpourings of subjectivity, asking to be civilized by a long-breathed poet”.
Pierre Perrault himself did not feel up to it: “I already know that he is too big for me. » (The Evil of the North1999) For him, the river is a reality “that escapes language” (The human face of a river without an estuary, 1999). The long poem that he dedicated to her at the end of his life begins with an affirmation of powerlessness: “I will name him from the outset and from experience the indescribable!!! This impotence is reaffirmed throughout the poem as if it were the only way to talk about the river.
Changing landscapes
It is surprising to see how this feeling of the impossibility of bringing the river into writing has persisted. He was surpassed in poetry only by The ode to the Saint-Lawrence, by Gatien Lapointe (1963) and in prose by endless river by Robert Hammer (1986). Until then, no work had been entirely devoted to him (except in English: Charles Sangster wroteSaint Lawrence and the Saguenay[1856]a poem in ten songs that celebrates the Thousand Islands River in the Gulf of St. Lawrence).
Perrault was therefore not entirely wrong when he deplored “a certain silence of the river at home” in The big look and said to be always in search of a “writing of the river”. One thing is certain, he would have been happy to see the set of texts entitled write the river (Leméac, 2015), which brings together the writings of some thirty authors with the aim of “awakening in us what the river carries with it in images and rhythms”. This book shows that there is not one river, but rivers. As Robert Marteau says: “We are free to look at you according to our free will and to have a thousand points of view on you, and to have a thousand ways of treating you. “.
Cartier’s river is not, in fact, the river of Pierre Morency, which is very different from that of Robert Marteau, which is different from that of Damase Potvin. So many authors, so many visions. Which do not only depend on the age, the culture, the preoccupations, the memories of the authors, because the river itself is varied, plural. Everything can change depending on whether we grasp it in its strictly fluvial portion or in its estuarine portion or even where it becomes a gulf. Everything changes depending on whether you look at it from one bank or the other, according to one season or another, according to one hour or another.
The Cartier River is the river of discovery. On his way to Hochelaga, he was enthusiastic about the richness of the river itself and of the lands bordering it: animals, birds and fish of all species, wood of all kinds. Cartier describes it as a veritable paradise.
Over the eyes
The Morency River is the one that encloses Île d’Orléans. It is a personified river that speaks to him like a friend in whole life and reveals to him that he is the source of his writing: “Even if I am one of the vastest rivers on this planet, I am entirely present in this place where you are. Right here I am the source and the gulf, estuary and rapids, channels and opening of the Atlantic Ocean. All the lakes, all the finest streams, the barely formed streams which murmur in the grass, the rivers with great clear waters, the slow and brown ones with their undulating course, all the beaches, with their creeks and their bays, all the coastal forests, salt meadows, flats, all the islands, all the rocks whitened with droppings, all the cliffs and the gray sand beaches, all of this is me and I am here. The entire waters of the land flow before you. I carry the beauty, richness and innumerable meanings of all waters. »
The Marteau River is mythical, brother of the Nile, the one to which we address ourselves with humility and reverence in River unending “Hello beautiful river: I paint you, I paint you, with the panicles of the rocks; on the endless sheet, on the roll of silk, with your mountain in the background, I write to you, make you up, tattoo, portraiture in China of the sky, in Japan of mirrors, in the Nile where the sacred ibis meditates, in the valley Kings […] »
That of Damase Potvin, in the Saint-Laurent and its islands, is above all that of the islands that he celebrates in the most poetic, sumptuous way possible: “We salute you all, islands of the St. Lawrence; we salute you when we see you at the break of dawn, when so melancholy ends the strange feast of rocks and waters prepared in the terror of the night; in the evening, after the great enchantment of yellow gold and vermilion on the waters and in the sky […] ; at noon when, from the zenith, the rays seem to spring from the depths of distant unknowns the bubbling waters of a slow flow of limpid green…”
This is how the images of the river come about. Thus the eyes multiply. Thus is created and enriched the “writing of the river” so desired by Perrault who said he was pained, in The big one paceto see that the St. Lawrence had died out “for lack of sight”.