Gérard Bouchard questioned himself in a recent text on the relevance of Maria Chapdelaine in our contemporary world and concluded that “its main springs have become anachronistic1 » (The duty, October 29, 2022). I would like to meditate a little on this assertion which is not trivial and goes to the heart of the question of what is always too quickly called “the classics” in Quebec literature.
To fully understand the oblivion in which we bathe, open any literary magazine of the 1990s, you will find almost no name that is still present on the literary scene today.
The Quebec literary institution is a machine for creating almost instantaneously and immediately crushing glories which disappear one after the other: oblivion is the norm, memory an exception. This is why we need to keep a few works in mind to mark the course of a collective literary history which, otherwise, would look like a black hole which would absorb all light, necessarily evanescent.
Of course, it is not a question of stifling the fantastic proliferation of contemporary Quebec literature (we are currently living through a kind of literary golden age), but rather of bringing this present into dialogue with the past that constitutes it. often in an unconscious way so that these works of now do not in turn fall into the usual torrent of oblivion that awaits them, as is unfortunately already the case for works that we celebrated just a few years ago.
Search your library for a few moments, you’ll see, it’s amazing: where is this one, what happened to this one? Most of your questions will be answered by silence.
Either, the case is heard. But back to Maria Chapdelaine a moment. It so happens that I have been teaching this work for years at the Cégep de Drummondville, constantly trying to develop my own vision of this work full of misunderstandings. We read it like a local novel, which it certainly is. Of the three voices Maria hears at the very end urging her to stay in the country of Quebec (nature, the French language and religion), only the first still speaks strongly to the hearts of my students, it’s true, although language still has some value, but religion certainly does not.
But we have also read this text as an example of the picturesque gaze cast by the French literary institution on French Canada. Let’s agree: if we stopped there, Gérard Bouchard would be right all along the line: we would no longer read Maria Chapdelaineand we would quickly forget it, like many other texts of this time elsewhere.
A work of the present
But a classic is not only a work of the past, it is also a work of the present: if a text still speaks to the hearts of today, it is because they find in it material to understand our world, otherwise it disappears like the others. And it is indeed the case of Maria Chapdelaine. But what can this text tell us yet again? Thomas Carrier-Lafleur and David Bélanger recently showed (He moved away. Inquiry into the death of François Paradis2019) that we can read this novel in the light of cinema and its four adaptations, a strange record.
You can even turn it into a kind of noir novel, a thriller where Eutrope Gagnon hides, under his beige exterior, a probable murderer who is very skilful in concealing his misdeeds. This is a big game-changer. But beyond the game of literary reading, for my part, I see in it a novel that says exactly the opposite of what the clergy once saw in it. The death of François Paradis, a fictional double of Auguste Lemieux devoured raw by the Belgians who had hired him and whose story Louis Hémon knew, is more like a tragedy announced from the very first words (Ite missa is : the mass is said, everything is decided in advance), that is to say that the famous “dark edge of the forest” will swallow, in the literal sense, a Frenchman who has fallen prey to cannibalism resembling native myth of the Wendigo (a human who has become a kind of werewolf after eating human flesh).
I’m not delirious: read the text again, everything is there for those who really dwell on it: the Wendigo itself, the digestive metaphors, the allusions to the powers of “indigenous magic”, etc. Yes, in the age of indigenous resurgence and ecological crisis, Maria Chapdelaine can be read as revenge announced against all those whites who dared to seize the territory without respecting it.
How can the same text give rise to such opposite readings? It’s that a classic is necessarily multidimensional, it turns on itself and lets glimpse a whole new possible interpretation, which was already there however, but buried, biding its time, that the present suddenly reveals to show an unnoticed aspect of the past, here the strongly colonizing dimension of the Quebec past. This is what a classic is: a work that still responds when the present changes, but which will die, like a star having exhausted its vital energy, when the next question in turn leaves it silent.