“Born to an illiterate father and a mother with little education, I grew up in Drummondville, on rue Duplessis, in a working-class family governed by fear, whose main manifestations were hypochondria, xenophobia and homophobia. »
This is what the author of Rue Duplessis calls it “starting life with three strikes,” even though his childhood, he emphasizes, took place in the shadow of loving and protective parents.
Many people will be surprised when discovering the career of Jean-Philippe Pleau, a sociologist by training born in 1977, a known voice on Radio-Canada radio, where he holds the helm of Think out loud (broadcast every Sunday evening), after having co-hosted and directed for a long time It’s crazy… in the company of the late Serge Bouchard (1947-2021).
In Rue Duplessis. My little darkness, he tells the story – or the “novel (let’s say)” – of an internal immigration, having passed from his original environment to a rather enviable status in “the bourgeois world” to which he belongs today. A big gap.
“Throughout the writing process, it was important for me not to try to settle scores, but rather to report reality,” Jean-Philippe Pleau points out in an interview. And if I wanted to settle scores, it is not so much with individuals as with a system, which allows inequalities to be reproduced, maintained and even, in certain cases, encouraged. »
“Our ordinary little life with my parents was the ordinary, everyday life of many Quebecers at that time in the 1980s and 1990s. Maybe we are ashamed of that, even today, ashamed to say that we come from this type of background. Whereas over time, I see a lot of pride and poetry, worldview and sensitivity. »
Class Defector
Between betrayal and social ascension, stories of class defectors, one might say, seem to be becoming a genre in themselves. A genre worn in particular, in France, by Didier Éribon (Return to Reims), Édouard Louis, Nicolas Mathieu or Annie Ernaux, which the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022 may have helped to legitimize. All speaking in the wake of the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
And in each of these cases, points out Jean-Philippe Pleau, who still regularly suffers from imposter syndrome, shame is a symptom, a memory and a sensation, often also a driving force.
“Shame, I think, is an indicator of social pressure and class contempt. When you feel it, you know that’s it, it’s happening in the eyes of the other. It either paralyzes you or it destroys you. It follows you every day like a rock in your shoe, which was the case for me for a long time. » This shame – and the shame of being ashamed – he began to take on himself and wanted to transform it into pride.
By his own admission, Jean-Philippe Pleau often has the feeling of having his “ass between two chairs”. In other words: “I’m a Duncan Hines cake with truffle frosting on it,” as he writes in Rue Duplessis.
Despite everything, he wanted his book to be as accessible as possible. “It was very important to include in my book, in quotation marks, modestly, the language of my parents,” explains the author, who here claims the direct influence of Annie Ernaux (The place, Shame), with its often very simple writing, where the language constitutes in itself a political position. “So that people from my background can recognize themselves, but so that they can also read it,” he adds, despite the presence here and there of certain sociological concepts perhaps less obvious to ordinary mortals.
“I bet that the sociological value of what I say in the book was greater than the risk I took by publishing it. It’s not just intimate. It is a social intimate, a sociological introspection. »
“I want a political statement,” says Jean-Philippe Pleau cautiously, referring to Édouard Louis, who has already expressed the wish that his books could be used to “rob society like one robs a bank”. A way of responding to the violence of social reproduction. “It’s not just a nice little story cute of poverty and of someone who got out of it. There are lots of people who are caught in this system, and this system is perpetuated,” adds the author of Rue Duplessis.
A statistical anomaly
“I am a statistical anomaly,” continues Jean-Philippe Pleau, who also considers writing, in a certain way, to “avenge” his own people. I was not supposed to speak into a microphone on Sunday evening on Radio-Canada. I wasn’t supposed to write books. My social verdict, to speak like Didier Éribon, was not that. »
Regarding the label of “novel” which covers the book, the author explains that he was especially keen not to present it as a story. Indeed, by reading a life experience like his as a story, he thinks, the system, or the “bourgeoisie”, could say to console itself that it is only a very singular experience. of a person who grew up in Drummondville, the only son of a tinsmith father with a sixth grade and a mother who stayed at home.
“With the idea of a novel, on the other hand, it seems that it falls, that it falls into the imagination and into the collective unconscious. It seems that we believe more in the social significance of the thing. »
In all cases, Rue Duplessis mixes claim, courage and immodesty. Particularly when the author openly addresses certain mental health issues, his own and that of his parents. Another form that shame can take. “This is another shame that has haunted me for a long time: everything that has to do with mental health. A shame that was produced by a system. In the 1980s and 1990s, mental health was in the blind spot in Quebec,” he continues, recalling that he used asthma pumps for years as a child, “while it was a panic disorder pushed into the carpet that was never diagnosed.”
In the eyes of the author, “saved” in some way by a sociology course at CEGEP – and who believes that a large part of the solution to inequalities consists of making education a real priority -, he does not make any doubts that issues of socio-economic inequality and mental health are closely linked.
“It’s a cocktail,” believes Jean-Philippe Pleau, who has retained from his previous life, in addition to imperfect teeth, a marked taste for beautiful bodywork and mags gleaming. Without the slightest shame.
Let us point out, in the same intimate and political vein, the recent publication of Cécile and Marx. Legacy of bonds and strugglesby Michel Lacroix (Varia, 2024).