In 2019, Fabien Cloutier presented My unclea documentary in which he tried to understand why this once affectionate term now refers to a detestable specimen of a dinosaur-man with a wandering hand and a fossilized mind.
Guillaume Borduas could, at first sight, correspond to this cliché. Jealous of his worn-out tools, skeptical of the promises of modernity, a good drinker, the main character of Correlieu, second novel by Sébastien La Rocque, regularly welcomes an assembly of good rough-hewn yâbes into his workshop: Mononcle, for whom it’s never too early to get one, Thomas, a notorious picker, Marc-André, a small-time mechanic, JP, a guy from shopand Marin, the old poet.
“Temperance vârtu tempérance of French Canadians! they all exclaim before swallowing their first sip and chatting with this false levity, full of melancholy, about this world that escapes them without them being unduly saddened by it, cut off as they are in their Mont-Saint-Hilaire campaign. The arrival of Florence, a young carpenter who asks Guillaume to take her under his wing after a work accident, threatens for a moment to corrupt the precious status quo to which our fellows cling.
Inevitable clash? Not really, and this is partly what the finesse of Sébastien La Rocque’s writing is due to, who skillfully thwarts the expectations he creates, never materializing the conflict he sows the seed between these gentlemen and their new comrade. .
Inspired by the universe of Pierre Perrault, who knew better than anyone how to paint the Quebec man as a sometimes rustic creature, but capable of realizing the evidence of beauty when it is in front of his eyes, Sébastien La Rocque shows here characters certainly stuck in a certain conception of masculinity, but without the rigidity, even less the boorishness, that one might associate with it. In short: the writer takes archetypes and gives them back all their humanity.
And if the encounter woven with silences between Guillaume and Florence resembles duets as we have often come across in fiction – the taciturn mentor who gently persists and the apprentice discouraged by the pig’s head of her master – it is evoked with so many nuances that it must be admitted that the classics exist to be revisited.
Punctuated with playful dialogues of a disarming and amusing accuracy, Correlieu also embraces the vocabulary of cabinetmaking, which La Rocque knows well because he is himself a cabinetmaker, and from which he debits a poetry giving the appearance of a ballet to his descriptions of the wood that is sawn, that sand and varnish.
Without siding with William or Florence, Correlieu refuses to speak of the past as an idyllic time, but does not lose sight of the fact that in the mouths of the masters of the world, the word progress too often designates this blind growth, that which stifles this extra soul that a piece of furniture contains when it was made by two hands and one heart.
Correlieu
Sebastien La Rocque
The August Horse
208 pages