There was a development in Quebec news yesterday. A group of terrorists has been formed: the Quebec Revolutionary Army/Armée révolutionnaire du Québec. They left a white powder in the Sherbrooke office of the Premier. The threatened area was evacuated but it turned out the powder was harmless baking soda: bicarbonate de soude.
The new army may dissolve, but they may also have announced that they intend to use deadly weapons. No one knows. Up to the October Crisis (1970), members of the Quebec Liberation Front/Front de libération du Québec, the terrorist branch of the séparatistes, as indépendantistes were then called, deposited bombs in mailboxes.
In Le Devoir, Quebec’s leading French-language newspaper, a journalist stated that Jean Charest, Quebec’s Premier, was afraid of the students. Shame on Jean Charest! Yet, a week ago, lawyers and jurists were finding fault with Bill 78. It was then considered an encroachment on the freedom of individuals. It often comes down to the brilliant sentence Jean Cocteau formulated to the effect that one had to know just how far one could go too far.
The next step in our examination of regionalism in Quebec literature is Maria Chapdelaine. I have published a short post on Maria Chapdelaine, a novel written by Louis Hémon (12 October 1880 – 8 July 1913), a Frenchman born in Brest. After studying law and oriental languages in the Sorbonne, Hémon moved to London and, in 1911, to Quebec. In 1912, he spent several months working with cultivateurs, or farmers in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean area, up the beautiful Saguenay River. He lived in a community called Péribonka and spent the winter of 1913 in that community, writing his novel.
Having completed his manuscript, Hémon sent it to France and started travelling west, probably to Edmonton where French citizens had settled at that time. Hémon was killed in a train accident on July 8, 1913, in Chapleau, Ontario. He did not live to see Maria Chapdelaine become a bestseller. It has been translated into more than 20 languages in 23 countries and it has been made into three movies.
The plot is simple, but, although Maria Chapdelaine is a roman du terroir, it differs substantiallyfrom Patrice Lacombe’sTerre paternelle and Pierre-Joseph-OlivierChauveau’s Charles Guérin. Louis Hémon did not feel dispossessed of his ancestral lang and betrayed. And he had not transformed Maria Chapdelaine into an ethnic conflict, which it was not, at least initially.
The artwork featured in this post are illustrations for Maria Chapdelaine, executed by Clarence Gagnon and housed at the McMichael Museum, in Kleinburg, Ontario.
However, Hémon worked with men like Maria Chapdelaine’s father, Samuel Chapdelaine a name not coincidentally resembling that of the Father of New France, Samuel de Champlain. These otherwise unemployed men were trying to transform rebellious soil into arable land. They had gone north, as the colourful curé Labelle (November 24, 1833 – January 4, 1891) advocated, and were “making land” (faire de la terre).[i] Father Labelle preached “colonisation.” That was the “patriotic” alternative to leaving for the New England states.
Maria’s ‘Choices:’ F. Paradis, L. Surprenant & E. Gagnon
As indicated in my post, Hémon gives Maria Chapdelaine three suitors: François Paradis, Lorenzo Surprenant and Eutrope Gagnon. François dies in a snow storm, which was to be expected. In traditional Quebec society, happiness was viewed not only as impossible, but as dangerous.Lorenzo Surprenant has come north to find a wife and take her down to the United States, but Maria turns him down. She will marry a neighbour, Eutrope Gagnon, and live as her mother lived. The names of the suitors are revealing: Paradis is paradise, Surprenant, surprizing, and Gagnon, close to the verb gagner: to win.
Maria Chapdelaine also differs from La Terre paternelle and Charles Guérin in that, unlike Chauveau’s Charles Guérin, it does not feature an ‘ugly’ Englishman: Mr Wagnaër. As for La Terre paternelle, although the novel does not feature an explicit ‘ugly’ Englishman, Jean Chauvin fails where an Englishman would have succeeded. I believe this is the reason why Lacombe views cities as unhealthy.
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Our next regionalistic novel is Father Félix-Antoine Savard‘s (August 31, 1896 – August 24, 1982) Menaud maître-draveur, 1937 (translated as Boss of the River, or Master of the River by Alan Sullivan (1947). It earned Savard a Medal from the French Academy.
[i]Curé Labelle, a legendary figure, is featured in Claude-Henri Grignon’s (Sainte-Adèle, 8 July 1894 – Québec, 3 April 1976) novel Un homme et son péché(1933). Grignon’s novel was transformed into a very popular serialized radio and television drama and was also made into a movie twice. The second movie is entitled Séraphin:Heart of Stone (2003). Séraphin is a miser and he is cruel to his wife Donalda.
© Micheline Walker
7 June 2012
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