Maxime Blanchard’s first fiction essay, Quebec does not exist (Varia, 2017), featured a nostalgic and bitter narrator who attacked, in a series of scattered and venomous notes, a Quebec locked in its weakness and its contradictions, condemned to disappear in a general indifference maintained by globalization , multiculturalism and neocolonialism.
The new offering from the author, who is also professor of literature and French language at the City University of New York, bathes in the same waters. The protagonist, who went from Éric Langevin to Jérôme Dagenais, takes a still sour look at the cultural and political situation in Quebec, clinging to the grandiose plots and forgotten beauties of history to mourn a past that no longer moves anyone And the beliefs and communities that made him believe in the possibility of a country.
Convinced that he is condemned to live in the most insipid and “stupid” era in history, Jérôme Dagenais, the writer’s alter ego, is not careful to describe his contemporaries, in particular this youth who “have no worthwhile experience”, “have stored up neither nobility nor breadth”, “revolt against Islamophobia and validism”, “are offended by the word “heritage””, insert “ trauma warnings everywhere”, and for whom existence is reduced to the screen of a telephone.
In interview at Duty in 2017, Maxime Blanchard said he expected to be called “radical, racist, unconscious” after the publication of his first work. However, these are not the words that spontaneously come to mind when browsing The motherland. It must be said that since 2017, this type of polarizing opinion has only increased in the media.
Because by trying to provoke, by throwing cannonballs at all winds against consumerism, acculturation, neocolonialism, gender theory, globalization, immigration, the lack of political ambition, the obsession with diversity and generalized mediocrity, the author sinks into a miserabilism that borders on lamentation. Because, he writes, “in Bern, in Montreux, in Delémont, he would not have observed, helpless and furious, those of his race curling up in obsolescence. He could have become Joël Dicker, a successful writer who was not terrorized by the assimilation of his people and the erasure of his culture. […] He would not have exhausted his talent and energy hating his country.”
Carried by an elegiac breath and a corrosive verve which is reminiscent of Pierre Falardeau, the work with the air of a pamphlet can still be read in one go, shot through with a communicative emotional charge and by the skill of its author to point out some dead ends and to sharply raise the contradictions of his contemporaries. “They demonstrated against the war in Gaza. They took an Uber home. They demonstrated against racial profiling. They bought shoes on Amazon. They demonstrated against the expulsion of undocumented immigrants. They rented an apartment on Airbnb. They demonstrated against an oil pipeline. They had a pizza delivered by DoorDash. »
But the perspective stops there, stubbornly turned towards the idealization of a past which was often not much brighter, and towards his works which are today confronted with a multitude of sideways glances. The author dissects a nostalgia that he knows is vain, without really managing to justify it.