Some authors seem immortal, others sink into oblivion. After a while, what’s left? In its monthly series Should we reread…?, The duty revisits one of these writers with the help of admirers and attentive observers. Many of them also cherish the memory of Hubert Aquin (1929-1977), who was not only a significant figure in Quebec literature (Next episode, Black snow), but also a must in the cultural and activist circles of Quebec in the 1960s and 1970s. Because in addition to being a filmmaker, screenwriter, essayist, editor-in-chief, publisher and producer, he wore the clothes of the independentist with panache revolutionary. At his own risk.
“It’s because I love the reader that I make him suffer. Basically, if the thing were too easy, I would have spent nothing more or less than a year, two years of my life preparing a fictional work that he could decipher or read in an hour and a half, two hours. »
Hubert Aquin spoke thus to Lise Payette, on April 24, 1975, as part ofCall me Lisa, a very popular talk show on Radio-Canada television. These two public figures knew each other very well, and for a long time, but the restraint, even the coldness, of the writer escaped no one. The host displayed the ambition to make it “accessible”, which some described as hermetic, but this was not the primary concern of the author of The invention of death.
Hubert Aquin’s priorities were multiple, like his professional trajectory, punctuated by brilliance and strategic functions (both at Radio-Canada and at the National Film Board), displaying an eclecticism to make you dizzy. Not to mention that, almost everywhere he went, he either slammed the door or someone showed it to him, which made the writer and publisher Roger Lemelin, who had hired him as literary director at Éditions La Presse, say a few years before his death, that Aquinas put a lot of effort into making this happen.
The pen and politics
This philosophy graduate quickly stood out thanks to his exceptional writing, his multiple talents and his lightning combativeness (weapon in hand, if necessary), first and foremost for the accession of Quebec to the concert of nations. An activist within the Rally for National Independence (RIN), Hubert Aquin did not possess the eloquence of Pierre Bourgault to stir up crowds, but his erudition and his writings inspired many sympathizers. He also did not fear intellectual contests, particularly in the journal Freedomoffering a solid response to Pierre Elliott Trudeau in a text that has become famous, “The cultural fatigue of French Canada”, published in 1962. While opposing the way in which the future Prime Minister of Canada described nationalism, Aquin notes, regretfully, the ambivalence of his compatriots towards independence.
Through this struggle, this great Formula 1 fan (he dreamed of a Grand Prix in Montreal in the 1960s) led many other battles, including with the police, judicial and medical authorities. Accusations of weapon possession and car theft (belonging to a priest, you can’t make that up) targeting him took him to the Albert-Prévost Institute in 1964, a psychiatric break where he wrote in part Next episode. Published the following year, this novel shocked the literary world. So critical to Duty, Jean Éthier-Blais welcomed the providential arrival of the first great Quebec writer. “Thank God,” he said at the conclusion of his rave article.
These were not his only troubles with justice and power. Even in Switzerland, Hubert Aquin was closely monitored and then expelled from the country in 1966, he who could have inspired, through his presence and his ideas, the Jura Liberation Front… This astonishing chapter in this extraordinary existence is recounted in Swiss Elegy (Hubert Aquin in Switzerland)a short film by Vincent Guignard made in 2001, punctuated with extracts from Little soldier (1963) by Jean-Luc Godard, a way of evoking the sometimes intrepid character of the independence activist.
Himself of Swiss origin, Vincent Guignard has long cultivated a true passion for the work of Hubert Aquin, dreaming one day of adapting Next episode At the movie theater. He even came across a Swiss producer who had once owned the rights. A former political science student at UQAM, now an editor, for several documentarians, he holds Aquinas’ novels very close. “I reread them constantly,” emphasizes Vincent Guignard. His thinking and modernity inspire me. Through him, I discovered my own Quebec identity, and I always regretted that it was not recognized at its true value. »
Fifteen years after this first film, he directed Portrait of a young man in Aquinian reader (2015), another intimate short film carried by the words of a medical student, ardent defender of the author’s words. “I spotted him at an Acfas conference. He spoke of himself eloquently, not to mention that he had done an internship at the Albert-Prévost Institute, where Aquin was interned. » The filmmaker does not hide the fact that he would have liked to accomplish more ambitious things with his work, but his two short films already sought to take the author “out of the purgatory in which he seems trapped for too long”.
Excerpts from “Political Existence”, taken from Blends of Literature I
See Beyond Next Episode
The literary work of Hubert Aquin has also inhabited Mélikah Abdelmoumen since the end of his secondary studies. The editor-in-chief of Quebec letters deplores its relative absence, both in the lists of the best Quebec novels and in literature programs. “ Next episodeit’s both thrilling and mysterious. Blackout presents itself as a spy novel, with a perspective on the issues of decolonization. Even Obombre, his unfinished novel, constitutes a form of autofiction at a time when we were not even talking about autofiction. » In the 1970s and 1980s, Next episode was a real bestseller thanks to the fervor of a large number of teachers, which is less the case today.
For someone who is also a novelist (The disasters) and essayist (Baldwin, Styron and me), Hubert Aquin still remains very present, if only through the diffuse influence he exerts on today’s literature. “When I read authors like Patrice Lessard (Chicken Excellence, Royal Cinema) or Nicolas Chalifour (Flight DC-408), I feel the same attraction as Aquin for formal audacity in the way of telling stories, winks, asides, etc. I don’t know if they admire him, perhaps they would claim to be more inspired by Borges, but Aquinas seems to me well anchored in the modern world. And if he were alive today, he would surely be a great admirer of the filmmaker David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive) ; both know how to lead us into the unconscious of their characters. »
Prey to blank page syndrome before ending his life in the gardens of the Villa Maria college in Montreal on March 15, 1977, after a first attempt in 1971 in a room at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Hubert Aquin had everything even left behind an abundant body of work. And not just literary. This is what Nino Gabrielli, librarian at the University of Montreal, and a great enthusiast of his “media work,” has been exploring for several years.
Excerpts from Next episode
“Hubert Aquin liked to quote André Malraux, wanting to “play his life on a game greater than [lui]””, recalls Nino Gabrielli, author of an anthology in soon to be three volumes entitled Hubert Aquin and the media and published by Leméac. Unfinished films, in the planning stage or thought to have disappeared, unpublished interviews (including with Georges Simenon, whom the author of Next episode admired), correspondence, nothing seems to escape the lynx eye of someone who resembles an archaeologist and who reveals camouflaged or unknown parts of a resolutely protean corpus.
“His novels are rich,” adds this collaborator at the Interuniversity Research Center on Literature and Culture in Quebec, “but we must not forget his essays, and we cannot reduce this part of his work to “The cultural fatigue of French Canada ”. » Nino Gabrielli sees this as the mark of a “total producer”, an expression that Aquin used to describe his eclectic approach, and which requires new lighting. “Why should the great trees of Quebec literature necessarily hide the rest of the forest? There is light for everyone. I find that our times are a little too fond of clear-cutting,” he says regretfully.
“He was a Renaissance man,” proudly asserts Mélikah Abdelmoumen. He had a political, aesthetic and social vision, while loving sport and popular culture. » « With Hubert Aquin, we can read the entire 20e century,” concludes Nino Gabrielli.