eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783165391 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2012 |
| Series: | French and Francophone Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Mindscapes of Montreal
Québec's Urban Novel, 1960â"2005
By Ceri Morgan
University of Wales Press
Copyright © 2012 Ceri MorganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78316-539-1
CHAPTER 1
Chapter OneThe Manichean City: The Modern City
As I pointed out in the introduction, it is a cliché, and not entirely accurate, to date Montréal's – and indeed, Québec's – entry into modernity as beginning in 1960, the year popularly associated with marking the beginning of the Quiet Revolution. Several modernising initiatives were taken up in the immediate post-war years, with two key examples being the construction of boulevard Dorchester (now René-Lévesque), in 1954–5, and the controversial public housing project, les Habitations Jeanne-Mance. Some projects predated this time: indeed, an initial drafting of a master plan for the central part of Montréal was carried out between 1941 and 1944. Nevertheless, the 1960s are remarkable for the scale of development carried out in a city that was projected to have seven million inhabitants by the close of the century. This modernisation was symbolised in landmarks such as Place Ville-Marie (1962), considered a Canadian innovation in high-density commercial construction, and gateway to Montréal's Underground City, a subterranean network of shops, food outlets and subway. The commercial downtown shifted further north-west to concentrate around Place Ville-Marie, which was soon joined by other skyscrapers in the international style of architecture. Vast areas of substandard housing were demolished, partly out of a perceived need for better-quality accommodation, and also to make room for all of the new construction. This prompted the displacement of inhabitants as well as public protest, with the most famous case being that of Milton-Park. In the 1970s, highly diverse citizen groups eventually succeeded in cutting demolition of the area by a third, reducing the scale of the proposed La Cité complex of hotel, apartment, office and shopping spaces, and achieving renovation of the original Victorian housing that had fallen into considerable decay. Other major innovations of the 1960s include the Metro, inaugurated in 1966 and Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67, along with other landmarks of the World Fair of the same year. Expo 67, themed Terre des Hommes/Man and his World, was a showcase of technological and engineering achievements. A motor for development, with its iconic US pavilion by Buckminster Fuller (now the Biosphere Environment Museum) and major artworks such as Alexander Calder's sculpture, Man (1967), Expo 67 was part of a wider cultural ebullition that also made itself felt in public art, songs, theatre, cinema and the publishing of francophone literature at unprecedented levels. Certain texts were crucial to what some have seen as a primarily cultural revolution. Confirming and reinforcing existing imaginary geographies of the city, they have come to dominate critical analyses of literary productions of the time. In what follows, I shall look at some examples of these, before moving on to consider how lesser-known novels might challenge the model of Montréal contained within the canonical works of this period.
In Imagining the Modern City, James Duncan draws on Kevin Robbins to argue that any rethinking of the urban in terms of planning must take into account that this space is not only one of community and pleasure, but also one of hostility. Duncan's comments are particularly appropriate with respect to the fiction examined in the first part of this chapter, which is concerned with antagonistic relations in the city. The Montréal novel of the 1960s is dominated by le texte national (the national text). The term was coined by writer and filmmaker, Jacques Godbout, in reference to his novel, Salut Galarneau!/Hail Galarneau! (1967):
Starting with Le Couteau sur la table/Knife on the Table I realised the extent to which the attempt to write a 'personal' literary work is vain and useless in Québec ... Therefore, I wrote Salut Galarneau ! (my first happy novel) and ... there I was, in the NATIONAL TEXT!
In Godbout's novel, the hero, François Galarneau, a hot-dog vendor and self-described ethnographer, walls himself up inside his house after a series of disappointments, including losing his lover to his glamorous and wealthy elder brother. Once there, he devotes his time to watching television and writing. Ultimately, however, Galarneau determines to 'vécrire' (p. 154) – a synthesis of living (vivre) and writing (écrire) – and the end of the novel sees him preparing to leave his self-imposed prison after achieving this. Salut Galarneau! is generally interpreted as marking the shift from individual to collective consciousness that characterised the Quiet Revolution. All the same, the novel is far more optimistic than most examples of the genre. Indeed, Ben-Z Shek defines le texte national as 'describ[ing] novels that were mainly concerned with Québec's place in Canada and the world – but in a more complex, contradictory, and tragic way'. Another important distinction between Salut Galarneau! and the bulk of the texts that have, until fairly recently, been primarily identified with Québec's nationalist canon, is that it is set in a suburb on Île-Perrot off the island of Montréal, rather than in the city itself. By and large, the anti-urban texte national figures Montréal as a cipher for Québec, with tensions between the city's two largest ethno-linguistic groups functioning as a metaphor for the wider national struggle.
I specify that I am dealing with the anti-urban texte national here so as to acknowledge the existence of other kinds of nationalist writing of the period. For a number of decades, le texte national was largely associated with the work of a handful of male authors. Increasingly, however, writing by women during the Quiet Revolution has been recognised as constituting part of Québec's nationalist literature. Several of these texts, including Marie-Claire Blais's carnivalesque Une Saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel/A Season in the Life of Emmanuel (1965) and Anne Hébert's historic Gothic, Kamouraska (1970) – both of which were seen as engaging with the national question at the time they were published – are set in the rural, domestic space. These rework le roman du terroir (the novel of the land), which dominated francophone Canadian literature from after Confederation until the 1940s. This was in order to undercut the French-Canadian nationalist values of l'agriculturalisme (an attachment to the land and a rural way of life that was seen as vital to the survival of Canadian francophones), Catholicism, and la revanche des berceaux ('the revenge of the cradles', or the maintaining of a high birth rate), along with the oppressive roles assigned to women by these. The choice of setting for these two strands of Québécois nationalist literature reprises – if only to subvert these, in the case of women's fiction – a long-standing association of the urban with the masculine and the domestic with the feminine found in white western culture and elsewhere. This is notwithstanding the fact that, as I highlighted in the introduction, what is popularly seen as the first example of the francophone social-realist anti-Montréal novel was written by a woman: Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'occasion pits the working-class francophone district of Saint-Henri against the wealthy anglophone district of Westmount. However, whilst writing by many women authors attempts to undo dominant genderings of space by revealing the dark underside to the idealisation of the family that had permeated French-Canadian literature the previous century, writing by men tries anxiously to assert these through an exaggerated machismo that is deliberately doomed to fail. In so doing, it inscribes an ambivalence towards Montréal at the same time as it renders it the symbolic prize in the struggle for sovereignty.
A number of the writers of le texte national were associated with Parti pris (1963–8), a cultural and political journal. A publishing house, Éditions Parti pris, was established at approximately the same time. Several of the authors published by Parti pris, such as Jacques Renaud, came from francophone working-class neighbourhoods on Montréal's east side. The partipristes promoted secularisation, socialism and independence for Québec, replacing the term 'French-Canadian' with the more self-affirming 'Quebecer'. Informed theoretically by Marxism, psychoanalysis, Sartre and anticolonial writers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Jacques Berque, the partipristes sought to reveal and denounce the alienation of Québec's francophones. In so doing, they hoped to provoke their readers into adopting their colonised status. This was perceived as a vital first step in transcending oppression. Drawing on the aesthetics of Québec's cinéma vérité and, frequently, of France's nouveau roman, the partipriste novel represented a littérature vérité of sorts, albeit one that often tended towards hyper-rather than social-realism. The movement was very much a Montréal phenomenon: Lise Gauvin describes how the writers for Parti pris rejected the francophone values of the past, dissociating themselves from clericalism, agriculturalism, 'the revenge of the cradles' and 'messianic nationalism based on survival'. Rather, the partipristes positioned themselves in an urban present that they aimed to challenge. In this way, Pierre Maheu's seminal essay, 'l'oedipe colonial', argues that narratives of national identity that drew on a glorious tradition of proselytising Catholicism served only to compensate for a reality in which Québec's francophones were 'a conquered people'. Maheu points out that these foundation myths could be mobilised only in the context of the rural parish, since they would be revealed as untenable within 'the industrial and Frenglish universe of Montreal'.
Actually, Québec as a whole was industrialised at the time Maheu was writing. However, his remarks relating to the language politics of 1960s Montréal prefigure a wider debate on the city's working-class vernacular, joual. Joual – the name of which comes from the bastardisation of cheval (horse) – contains vocabulary dating from pre-Revolutionary France, as well as various anglicisms. In 1959, joual was famously criticised by a Catholic monk schoolteacher in an anonymous letter to Le Devoir that was published under a pseudonym attributed by the editor of the paper, André Laurendeau. The letter was followed by several more attacking the poor quality of French that was both spoken and taught at schools. An anthology of these came out the following year, entitled Les Insolences du frère Untel/The Impertinences of Brother Anonymous. Until this time, literary works by francophone Quebecers largely mimicked the norms of metropolitan France. Although some writers, including Gabrielle Roy, used joual, they did so in order to lend authenticity to the dialogue in their fiction. During the mid-1960s, however, the vernacular was taken up by a number of authors both as a means of expressing francophone oppression under what Gauvin describes as 'anglo-saxon capitalism' and as a means of self-assertion. Joual was not used by all of those engaged in nationalist writing: Hubert Aquin, who was an occasional contributor to Parti pris, saw what was effectively the academisation of the vernacular as an appropriation of working-class speech. Examples of the politicised use of joual include Gérald Godin's poetry anthology, Les Cantouques: poèmes en langue verte, populaire et quelquefois française (1966) and Jacques Renaud's Le Cassé/Flat broke and beat/Broke City (1964).
Le Cassé, which Shek describes as the 'purest' work of joual, uses the vernacular both in dialogue and the narration. Renaud's novella is identified by the author as a purely personal, cathartic text. It has nevertheless assumed the status of the classic texte national. Indeed, the importance of this work is such that it became the framework through which much of the nationalist writing of this period has been read and, to a lesser extent, written. For example, the memoirs of former Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) member, Francis Simard, Pour en finir avec octobre/Talking it out: The October Crisis from Inside (1982), contain the narrative of growing up in a poor working-class neighbourhood in the greater Montréal region and drifting from one low-paid job to another before becoming politicised and dropping out of mainstream society. While this move to collective political action contrasts with the attitudes of Renaud's protagonist, the narrating of the trajectory from poverty to social awareness, disillusionment and, finally, violence has formal similarities with Le Cassé. Renaud's novella is a highly stylised, hyper-realist work, which renders the alienation of its characters absolute through a mix of existentialism, Marxism and anti-colonial theory. These are combined with an element of noir in the text's exploration of society's underside. Le Cassé has all the qualities that have come to be associated with the anti-urban nationalist genre: a francophone, working-class anti-hero whose pathological behaviour is the expression of his social, economic, cultural and linguistic oppression, hostile relations within Montréal, and an exaggerated machismo. These are rendered through a poeticised vernacular that serves to intensify the violence of the setting. Johnny ('Ti-Jean'), the unemployed and 'broke' central character, kills a drug dealer, Bubbles ('Bouboule'), whom he erroneously believes to be having an affair with his partner, Philomena ('Philomène'). Johnny goes on to break into the apartment where Philomena is staying, intending to have sex with her before killing her. Once there, however, he interrupts her having sex with a middle-class student, Berthe. Unbeknown to Johnny, Berthe is paying Philomena for sex. Incredulous at discovering that Philomena has been having an affair with a woman, Johnny assaults her, before continuing to wander around Montréal's sticky summer streets.
Informed by Fanon's Manichean conceptualisation of the colonial situation as a relationship between 'two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature', Renaud's novella effectively represents Montréal as a bi-ethnic city that is further divided along class lines. Frequently, the anti-urban texte national takes the model of a Montréal split between a poor francophone east and wealthy anglophone west. As I pointed out in the introduction, this has been a key 'cognitive mapping' of the city since the middle of the nineteenth century, when mass immigration, primarily from the British Isles, led to the establishing of a broad pattern of Protestant anglophones living to the west of boulevard Saint-Laurent, also known as the or la Main, the north-south axis that divides the city in two. Francophone Catholics lived to the east of this street, and Catholic Irish and other immigrants of non-British origin settled in between these majority groups. Le Cassé takes up this model, as when Johnny crosses rue Sherbrooke at the intersection with boulevard Saint-Laurent: 'the Main cuts across Sherbrooke. Abundance and Excrement' (p. 59). Renaud's novella is situated primarily on the east side of Montréal, despite opening in the west of the city, on avenue du Parc near rue Bernard, on the border of the neighbourhood of Mile End. Le Cassé contains references to rue Saint-Denis, where Johnny lives, rue Duluth, where Philomena is staying at her friend's apartment and parc La Fontaine. Avenue du Parc and boulevard Saint-Laurent have historically been, and remain, ethnically mixed streets. Indeed, the latter is described as such in literature predating the Quiet Revolution: Patrick Straram's 'Tea for One', written in 1958 and published in 1960, contains a description of boulevard Saint-Laurent that prefigures the way in which this is represented in Régine Robin's classic novel on immigrant dislocation, La Québécoite/The Wanderer (1983). Interestingly, given that Bonheur d'occasion mobilises a bi-ethnic model of Montréal, Roy's journalism also figures Montréal as ethnically diverse. Any such diversity is suppressed in Renaud's novella, which contains only francophone characters. Simon Harel argues that the lack of anglophones within the Montréal of some partipriste literature serves merely to underline their power. Their absence may also be due to the focus on class in this writing. This interpretation is supported by Robert Schwartzwald, who reads Berthe and Bubbles as figures who underline the fractures within the francophone community.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mindscapes of Montreal by Ceri Morgan. Copyright © 2012 Ceri Morgan. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Series Editors' Preface,Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Chapter One: The Manichean City: The Modern City,
Chapter Two: The City as Site of Trauma,
Chapter Three: The Spectacular City,
Chapter Four: Mixité in Montréal,
Chapter Five: Montréal as Metropolis: The Globalised City,
Chapter Six: Microspaces,
Conclusion,
Notes,
Appendix: Novels and Critical Texts Translated into English,
Bibliography,