French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

How to designate the various French language literatures originating outside of France without marginalizing and, to some extent, excluding them? And how, on the other hand, to indicate the particular status of these literatures that are so hard to name? Their writers have in common their situation “at the crossroads of languages,” in a context of conflict—or at the very least, competition—between French and other languages in proximity, that produces in them a linguistic superconsciousness. Thus, the Quebecois writer shares with writers of other francophone literatures a particular sensitivity to the problematic of languages, a sensitivity that finds expression in numerous accounts testifying to the degree to which writing, for each of them, is synonymous with discomfort and doubt. Gaston Miron once summed up this situation admirably: “Sometimes I invent myself, like a shipwreck, in the whole expanse of my language.”¹ In this sentence, both sides of the same reality exist simultaneously: the possibility of ruin or creation, of creation and ruin, the two of them inextricably bound.

Francophone writers also share the position of addressing various audiences, separated by different cultural and linguistic experiences, which obliges them to find suitable strategies for recognizing their communities of origin while at the same time appealing to a wider readership. How to achieve a true practice of the “aesthetic of the diverse,” as Victor Segalen puts it, without being branded as a regionalist or exoticist? At a time when globalization raises questions about the fate of languages, the issue of writer-audience relationships that the francophone writer confronts is at the very heart of the current debates, implicating the readability of cultural and linguistic codes.

These transverse relationships do nothing to prevent institutional differences between one literature and the next. In his 1972 work L’institution de la littérature, Jacques Dubois, describing the situation of Quebecois literature’s “cultural autonomy,” speaks of a “utopian model transferable to the whole of the French literary institution.”² Even today, Quebecois literature still enjoys relative independence in the francophone space, since it possesses its own publishing, legitimization, and sanctioning systems. If it is forever desired and desirable, Parisian recognition has an altogether relative impact on the author’s renown in his or her own cultural environment. Thus the notion of “world literature in French” does not impinge upon those contexts specific to the development of the work.

A certain vagueness also surrounds the notion of postcolonialism. Nevertheless, we cannot deny the fact of colonialization at the time of the expansion of the European powers. The word, if not the thing itself, was used in Quebec at a few strategic moments. New France was populated by the French and constituted what is called a populating colony, giving rise to a particular culture, as was the case throughout the New World. The inhabitants of New France, a territory that, at the time, included essentially all the St. Lawrence River valley and the Great Lakes region, were colonial and colonizing Europeans who could not truly call themselves colonized, except by the authorities of the central power. The truly colonized were the Amerindians, with whom the Europeans maintained a fur trade, and whom they attempted to assimilate by teaching them the benefits of “civilization” and Catholicism.

Under the English regime (1760–1840), the situation was very different, since the francophones became British subjects, subject to various types of exclusion. As years passed, they nevertheless regained certain rights. In 1774, the Quebec Act largely rebuilt the French American territory, designated as the “Province of Quebec,” reestablished French civil laws, opened public offices to Catholics, and gave the Catholic church the right to collect tithes. But in 1791, following the American Revolution and after the massive influx of loyalists to Canadian soil, a new Constitutional Act divided the Province of Quebec into two distinct parts, Upper Canada (the current Ontario) and Lower Canada (the current Quebec); each province was provided with a representative assembly as well as a legislative council under the authority of a governor named by London. But in Lower Canada, the francophones revolted against the English or Scottish minority’s claims to a monopoly on high administrative offices and the right to dominate a country with a francophone majority. Disturbances erupted in 1837–38, followed by a bloody crackdown and the suppression of Lower Canada’s constitution. The British Lord Durham was then given the responsibility of studying the fate of the “Canadians” and developing a plan for a new government capable of quieting the unrest. The conclusions of his 1839 report are sadly infamous: “I harbor no doubts on the subject of the national character that must be granted to Lower Canada; it must be that of the British Empire, that of the majority of the population of British America, that of the great race that must, in a future era, predominate over the whole North American continent.”³ Then followed the Act of Union, in 1840, which constituted a regression from the preceding political regime and nullified the relative political autonomy of the predominantly French Lower Canada, since the two provinces, Higher and Lower Canada, were henceforth reunited under a single form of government. After this unfortunate experience, the francophones accepted the historic compromise of the Canadian Confederation (the British North America Act), created in 1867 at the instigation of representatives from four provinces: Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.

In that same year, 1867, the poet Octave Crémazie, then exiled in France, used the term “colony” to describe the situation of the Canadian writer. “From a literary perspective, we will only ever be a simple colony,” he wrote to a friend who had remained in Quebec, because French language literatures, according to him, would never be able to compete with the mother literature. A century later, the writers associated with the journal Parti pris (1963–68) appealed once more to the notion of colonization to describe their situation. Adopting the analyses of Memmi and Fanon, these writers claimed to be culturally, politically, and economically colonized by the Anglo-Saxon presence. A special issue, edited by Pierre Maheu, compiled the “portrait of the colonized Quebecois.”⁴ But according to Jacques Berque, it is a matter of “colonized foreigners.” For his part, Albert Memmi notes that the Quebecois share certain traits with the colonized, but he prefers to use the word “dominated” rather than “colonized.” According to him, Quebec is doubly dependent, despite its high standard of living, both internally within the whole of Canada itself and globally with regard to the United States. “In one sense, all of Canada is already virtually a colony of the United States. It is just that, if the English Canadians are consenting parties, the French Canadian refuse to be,” he notes. Thus we must identify the components of Quebecois dependence, because all domination is “relative” and “specific.”⁵ To the extent that we cannot speak of colonialism in the strict sense, we cannot speak of postcolonialism either. Nevertheless, within the body of recent Quebecois literature, we can see strategies similar to those evident in postcolonial literatures.⁶ But these are less strategies of resistance and dispute with regard to the French literary institution than strategies for recentering and creating new literary canons. In recent decades, writers have proposed linguistic projects that also constitute new novelistic poetics. Thus we will see by way of a few examples how the novel’s text speaks the language, either as a distinct isotopy, that is, through thematization of the subject and the recurrence of metalinguistic commentaries, or through a series of processes that range from more or less mimetic, stylized, or fantasized representations of social discourse to the festive interaction of languages. Or how, in the literary domain, any fact of language becomes an effect of language to the extent that the modalities of integration of languages or language levels in a story become narrative arguments that affect the general poetics of the text.

If the threat that the French language will disappear in America haunts the consciousness of Quebecois writers, to varying degrees according to generation, and requires their vigilance with regard to the status of French in their society, the feeling of the language expressed beginning in the 1980s privileges the notion of variance, that is, invention. It is this feeling that I will focus on now, by examining the forms adopted by a few contemporary novelists—among them Michel Trembly, Francine Noël, Réjean Ducharme, and Jacques Poulin—to acknowledge their situation “at the crossroads of languages.” All these authors integrate into their novelistic poetics reflections on the language and propose innovative strategies in order to account for a linguistic multilingualism.

Let us consider first Gabrielle Roy’s (1909–83) canonical work Bonheur d’occasion, the first great urban portrait of a Montreal working-class family’s difficult survival in the World War II era.⁷ From the perspective of language, we can observe in it the exemplary methods of the “realist” novel, for example, the use of the simple past tense, the indirect style, and the vernacular to report conversations. Even though on several occasions the narrator adopts the perspective of one or another of the characters, he is very careful not to reflect their linguistic idiosyncrasies anywhere but in reported or cited discourse, that is to say, in each of their individual idiolects. Reality only appears “between quotation marks,” as the Roland Barthes expression goes. Barthes notes further that at the point when one begins to insert into the literary language itself “some reported discourse, drawn from inferior languages,” it “decorates the literature without threatening its structure. . . . This social language, a kind of theatrical costume hung on an essence, never engaged the totality of the one who was speaking it; the passions continued to function above the speech.”⁸ That is the case with the fragments of spoken French reproduced in Bonheur d’occasion. The city and the country, the rich and the poor, the language of characters and the language of the narrator, French and English, are so many sealed borders or rather, separated spaces. Intrusions of language will subsequently serve another purpose.

A few decades later, beginning in 1978, Michel Tremblay (b. 1942) proposed a new way of integrating the popular language into the narrative. Known first as a dramatic author, he achieved success by scandal in 1968 with a production of the Belles-Soeurs. For the first time on a subsidized, bourgeois theater stage, at the Rideau-vert, the Montreal vernacular, known as joual, was legitimized, and by the same token, it destabilized a portion of the audience and critics, accustomed until then to more conventional forms of theater and especially to more refined language.⁹ Those same critics, who had initially characterized Tremblay’s theater work as realist, gradually adopted the habit of putting that term aside, emphasizing instead the distancing methods used in his plays: the chorus, double stage levels, parallel voices, and so on. Tremblay made the language submit to a treatment analogous to that of his theatrical forms. That is what produces the text’s effet joual, an effect obtained by transcribing the oral dimension of the popular language, but also by a complex transcoding, articulated in the double code of the oral and the written, and finally by various literarization processes. This lyric, ritualized speech proceeds from scholarly training and mastery indisputably grounded as much in classical theater as in the Brechtian model. On the other hand, Tremblay’s attention to the lowly, reference to the grotesque body and material life, and almost exclusive choice of the vernacular brings this theater close to Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. In giving these elements an elevated treatment, worthy of the tragic and poetic “great theater,” Tremblay furthered not only a bursting of the realist illusion but also a transfer of codes that benefited popular culture and language. It was no longer a matter of conflict between language levels as with Roy, but rather of interference and reversal. Popular language thus became a foundation of cultural speech.

The notion of carnivalization applies to Tremblay’s theater to the extent that it is a matter of juxtaposing the low, the popular, the comic, with the high, the serious, the tragic. But this coexistence takes place less through the cohabitation of styles and registers than by the suppression of distances and the reversal/substitution of codes, resulting in the serious and scholarly taking charge of the popular. In the novels, on the other hand, many registers coexist and keep company without invalidating one another, which led Tremblay to conceive of new methods of inscription and interaction for the vernacular.

In La grosse femme d’à côté est enceinte, the text we will cite for evidence, we find the characters’ speeches integrated into the narrative passages, to produce an immediate actualization of the scene, and a lessening of the distance between the language of narrator and characters:

In this passage, a non-authoritative narrator, barely present and barely evaluative, seems constantly ready to disappear behind the words of the characters, which he embeds in a very fluid way. Hierarchy is abandoned, as well as any explanatory commentary aimed at translating the idiomatic expressions for a foreign audience. In Tremblay’s prose, we move imperceptibly from one level of discourse to another. It is a matter of modulation, or better still, of a kind of weaving meant to mitigate the tension between the registers of speech. This illustration of novelistic hybridization is accompanied as well by the insertion of the vernacular into the narrator’s discourse. If the narrator’s language is not marked by the processes of transcribing and transcoding orality, it nonetheless draws on a lexicon and expressions that are specifically Quebecois, that is, the same ones used by the characters: “peinturée,” “balloune,” “une gang,” “matchait,” “siau,” and so on. Thus, there is “contamination” and hybridization, despite the “deoralization” (desoralization?) that these novels demonstrate.¹² And one final element to note: the cat Duplessis and the dog Godbout, whose names evoke former Quebec prime ministers, are not only granted speech but also speak the purest form of joual, from the Plateau Mont-Royal section of Montreal. Here Tremblay acknowledges his ties with a certain South American “magic realism,” giving free rein to the imagination at the very heart of the banal and quotidian. He also demonstrates his desire to abolish distances in favor of universal, playful participation in speech, speech in which hybridization and dialogism—together continually recalling the body and material life—again evoke carnivalesque ambivalence.

Literary language for Tremblay is an open and constantly evolving system. It reveals a quest that tends to go beyond the opposition of categories into a festive integration of language levels. The author replaces the conflict of codes with a tension comprising tolerance and interaction. French for this writer is a mobile material, capable of yielding to the adaptations and modifications rendered necessary by specific contexts. In his case, we could point to an interiorization and reappropriation of the norm in texts marked by a joyous relativity of discourses, texts that remain no less accessible to foreign readers than to the author’s community of origin.

Yolande Villemaire (b. 1949) adopts a very different strategy in La vie en prose, an emblematic account of the 1980s playing upon the registers of speech and constructing its framework out of what appears to be trivia. Between parody and deference, Villemaire draws her inspiration from contemporary mythologies, from Tintin to Mickey Mouse, the better to foil them. This novel’s originality consists of exploding the notions of subject and character in the proliferation of images and dazzle of writing freed of certain constraints, such as unity of plot. The book, which opens with the transcription of talk heard during a meeting of women editors, subsequently multiplies the places and narrative temporalities. This excerpt reproduces their discussion about a film:

The narrator’s position in this passage is hard to pin down. The characters seem to be escaping any given position, through hybridization and plurality of styles, effects, registers. Speech is disseminated in a maelstrom of voices, tonalities, indeed even temporalities since each of the characters is presented in different situations of verbal interactions, in defiance of the norm and linearity. With no linguistic censor to intervene, the repertoire of popular Quebecois expressions used is vast and goes from “bébites,” “niaiseax,” “capotant,” “paqueter,” “astheur” to anglicisms such as “knockée,” “freak,” “flipper,” and so on. In addition, a certain poetic discourse is parodied as well as attempts to feminize the language: “Elle announce qu’elle va mettre sa ‘pantalonne blanche.’”

Even more than language effects, the dominant trait of this novel appears to be a constant appreciation for and commentary on linguistic phenomena. Yolande Villemaire grants her characters true linguistic consciousness. Thus what first seems spontaneous speech is just as much a discourse on speech, discourse that takes on the aspect of an intentionally exaggerated gulf between two types of code: “Comme dabetude, you know what I mean.” Or again, of illicit translations made from semantic slippages: “Something so strange . . . [tellement tellement étrangère], right there in the mirror [la mirage].”

Inquiring into language and the relationship of reality to words is a leitmotif of the novel. “Life in prose, because there’s no distinction,” we read midcourse. And then, two lines later: “Maybe I’m missing a bit of life since I’ve shut myself off twice over in prose.” Writing is inscribed between these two postulations. For Yolande Villemaire, words have a vocalic color and a presence. But this power and presence are also responsible for a few misunderstandings, because her characters sometimes notice that words become a screen for corporeal reality. Thus, despite the exuberance of the words exchanged, this text finally leads to a disclosure of the fundamental inadequacy of language. Sphinx-book, this novel—based on the prolixity of speech coupled with a strong intertextuality that refers to certain emblematic figures of Quebecois prose (and notably to revolutionary characters created by the novelist Hubert Aquin)—ultimately attests to the disjunction between words and reality. It is a sequence of fragments wrought by the impossibility of “naming the unnamable with such lame instruments as words.” La vie en (p)rose, life in prose, is above all the life of prose, the only vie en rose (rosy life) possible since it relies on language’s capacity to compensate. But, in a single gesture, the novel denounces even the limits of that life.

Another example of an overt discourse on language appears in Maryse (1983) by Francine Noël (b. 1945). This novel questions whether that marvelous language that allows us to communicate, that grand francité-francitude that encompasses us like a mâche-mallow, may lose us in its too vast bosom.” The book recounts the story of a generation of leftist intellectuals, the generation that was twenty years old in 1968 and experienced various upheavals, the rise of feminism primary among them. Maryse, the narrative’s central figure, a student of “literology” and aspiring writer, is torn between the dictates of the remarkable “genius of the French language,” a character born of her imagination, who, to “compensate for her small magnitude, spoke very quickly and incessantly,” and the risk of regionalism, “picturesque but regional.” Maryse must create her own language. Or rather, Maryse, whose real name is Mary O’Sullivan, the daughter of an Irish father and Quebecois mother, is forced, like an amnesiac, to reinvent her language: “What unease lies sleeping under the silence of one and the babble of the other? No one had ever really been at ease in their own words: neither Tom’s broken English nor the underprivileged French of her mother had served them.”

Maryse’s mother tongue is labeled negatively as a working-class language: “Her way of saying “plaisir” irritated me because in the diphthong, I vaguely felt the mark of their different origins.” It is also a language threatened with becoming an “ornamental French tongue” in the sociocultural context of Montreal. But for Maryse, “to live is to speak.” To escape the silence (that of the mute character, Elise Laurelle, or of Marie Uguay, the deceased Quebecois poet to whom the novel is dedicated), she sets off on a journey similar to Eliza Doolittle’s adventure in the play Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw, the true intertextual model for the novel and fetish/account: “She said to herself: ‘Yes, that’s what it is, it’s a language trip. I’ve always taken language trips and at the convent, that’s how I managed to get out of it . . .’” This language trip, the means the character finds to access her own history, draws as much from the register of popular language, a language strewn with lexical anglicisms, as from the register of more classical, even poetic, French: the textual references range from Rutebeuf to Rhugo [sic], and include the Quebecois novelists Roy and Ducharme. Such linguistic adventures lead to a simultaneously lyric and ludic language—whether the “genie du français,” that guardian of the norm and the “beautiful language” (who seems suspiciously like “secondhand genie”), likes it or not.

From the perspective that interests us, the Ducharme case is exemplary. More than a simple building material for fiction, language ultimately becomes the very subject of his work. Titles, names of characters, intertextual figures and references testify to an impertinence matched only by the liberty with which the novelist treats the language or languages he uses. His books have been said to “push the Quebecois language beyond itself.”¹³ But what language is that? Are there no grounds for proposing, at least hypothetically, that a particular novelistic language might have been created: Ducharmian? In what ways does it approach the polyphony Bakhtine saw as necessary to the art of the novel? What are its working methods?

From the outset, Ducharme (b. 1941) chose language as a subject of reflection, of fantasy, indeed even of fiction. In L’avalée des avalés (1966), Bérénice Einberg, struck by the inadequacy of standard languages, proposes inventing a new language, Bérénician, and she explains, “In Bérénician, the verb to be is not conjugated without the verb to have.” The whole of Ducharme’s work can be read as a quest to make the meaning of the words explode, to push them beyond their conventional limits and return to them a palpable power of expression, similar to that call sounded by two friends cut off from one another in a forest, which takes on a vocalic color: “Nahanii.” This representation of the language is accompanied by figure- and wordplay that seems infinitely extendable, so endlessly astonishing is Ducharme’s capacity for invention. In Dévadé (1992) for example, the range of styles adopted by the narrator extends from the poetic to the vulgar, from the neologism (“femmille,” “camionne,” “amougandise” [amourgandise]) to the revived cliché (“la chair de frousse,” “se faire hourra-qu’on—rie”), not to mention the multiple figures composed of puns (“qui passe ou qui casse, que ça geigne ou que ça saigne, qu’elles pleurent ou qu’elle [elles] meurent”), alliterations (“Le taré tordu par la trotte”), and various rhymes and assonances. Metalinguistic commentaries, more or less important depending on the texts, will go so far as to implicate the members of the Académie Française in Le Nez qui voque (1968), because they “avoid the dishwashers and the waitresses, disdain them, don’t associate with the vulgar and diploma-less members of society.” Let us add that this thematization of the language is often coupled with a parodic presentation of writing and writer, as with the character of Gaston Gratton-Chauvignet de l’Estampe in Les enfantômes, “modest troubadour of puddles,” an unknown poet whose work has the perfectly enigmatic title, Miroirs de boue.

In L’hiver de force (1973), we witness a performance of joual, that Montreal dialect shot through with anglicisms already present in Michel Tremblay’s theater, at the same as the establishment of a clever paratext provides an ironic distancing from it. The “beautiful writing” the narrator demands serves to return the work of the writer to the dimensions of the written form, that is, it is a way of displaying a zero degree of style. Nevertheless, in comparison to the earlier novels, the book’s originality inheres largely in the unusual system created by the presence of notes at the bottom of the page. Apparently employed to explain and translate certain words, especially English expressions, this device quickly turns playful. How, indeed, to take seriously a system of “references” such as this one: on the same page, the three words, “grilled-cheese,” “dill-pickles,” and “smoked-meat” are footnoted, and a fourth note, for the words “monde ordinaire,” offers not the French translation but the English words “cheap people.” Similar impertinences are frequent. For “I want to get off,” the note reads, “Arrêtez la terre, je veux descendre.” For “anyway,” the “translation” is given as “ennéoué.” Even while creating the fiction of a double addressee or a double audience, these textual signals establish a gentle complicity with the Quebecois reader, the only one capable of decoding all the language effects in L’hiver de force and noticing the many tensions that underlie the open mimicry and apparent neutrality of the narrator’s discourse, reflecting a series of ironic gaps. The notes thus register some hesitation at the moment of enunciation and are similar to an asynchronous or off-camera voice, as in film.¹⁴ All the while pretending to submit to the necessity of, in some cases, very precise translation, Ducharme transforms this practice into textual play, on one hand, and leaves untranslated most of the Quebecois expressions he uses on the other. What his novels lose in readability, they gain in linguistic invention and subversive power, since of course any gloss, even any translation process inscribed into the text, assigns the receptor culture a higher status than the transmitter culture. Moreover, we know that incorporating into the body of the text words belonging to a language variety, in this case, Quebecois usages and lexicons, without marking them in any particular way (quotation marks, italics, citations, and so on), gives this community the same status as that of the receptor. Write Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, “The gradual discarding of glossing in the post-colonial text has, more than anything, released language from the myth of cultural authenticity, and demonstrated the fundamental importance of the situation context in according meaning. While the untranslated word remains metonymic and thus emphasizes the (posited) experiential gap which lies at the heart of any cross-cultural text, it also demonstrates quite clearly that the use of the word, even in an English language context, confers the meaning, rather than any culturally hermetic referentiality. Ultimately, the choice of leaving words untranslated in post-colonial texts is a political act, because while translation is not inadmissible in itself, glossing gives the translated word, and thus the “receptor” culture, the higher status.”¹⁵

The representation of languages in Dévadé is equally complex. This novel presents a certain P. Lafond, called Bottom, who appears as a “rada,” that is, a displaced person who survives for better or for worse by doing various small jobs and becoming a companion of sorts to a handicapped woman nicknamed “la patronne.” A quick reading could give the impression of a functional distribution that adopts the tetraglossic model of the sociolinguist Henri Gobard, a model that stipulates that any society functions according to a hierarchization of languages, or at the very least, of functions attributed to language.¹⁶ Indeed, in Dévadé, we find present in the text the four functions Gobard identifies, that is, vernacular language, defined as “maternal, territorial, and rural”; referentiary language, the quintessential language of the culture; the lingua franca, the language of exchange, commerce, and communication; and mythic language, the language “that refers to a spiritual, religious, or magical world.” The vernacular language is spoken by the two radas, Bottom and Bruno, who hail from the same village, called Belle-terre, and who even call themselves brutes and peasants. To this language is opposed the referentiary language, here represented by the refined French of la patronne. In this novel, French is presented as the franca lingua, but it is short-circuited by English each time it is a matter of a purchase linked to work (the cap bought at St. Henri Uniforms) or to luxury (the presents at Maggie Books and Things), or if it is a matter of getting to the hospital or getting a job at Centreville (“Do you have experience?”). As for mythic language, this function is fulfilled by Italian, which is present in the novel as a language endowed with mystery.

The metalinguistic commentaries take on a new dimension when a foreign language, Italian, intervenes. Anxious to learn it, Bottom has concocted with la patronne “un plan d’apprentissage aux pommes” that consists of translating an Italian version of Love Story into French on a daily basis. Each stage of the translation gives rise to reflections on the meaning of standard expressions in French, English, or Italian. Thus, “c’est idiot, mais ça m’agace” is said in Italian, sarà idiota ma mi secca, which, translated literally becomes “c’est idiot mais ça me sèche.” And Bottom adds in a kind of delighted astonishment, “It’s crazy the ‘alienating’ effect that has on me by knowing it. As though there’s pleasure, as though there’s sense in what has no importance whatsoever.” Gradually the Italian phrases come to truly punctuate the story, rather than serving as a simple cultural pastime. Italian no longer simply functions as accompaniment, but takes on diagetical value: the word aimer is defined in Italian: “Voler bene! . . . Aimer, en italien, c’est se vouloir du bien.” Thus Dévadé can be read as an attempt to appropriate not only styles and languages, but also tongues. As a traversal of discourses and an effort to escape the alterity and strangeness of the tongue. As a passage and reversal of the “alienating” effect into the “dialogizing” effect, since it is a matter, in the final examples cited, of an actual interaction between languages.

In this novel, Réjean Ducharme has chosen to rely on the whole expanse of language, of languages, to make meaning explode and to bring into being a new language based on the aesthetic of the diverse (in the sense that Édouard attributed to this term, following Segalen) and on musical polyphony. This is an aesthetic that thumbs its nose at all hierarchy, that uses language as a supple, flexible material, set in motion by the musician’s bow playing new scores, without regard for the norm, or rather, letting different norms coexist and confront one another, as so many tonalities to be explored. Doesn’t Ducharme have a “theory on the effect of sounds on the meaning of things”? Which explains the importance of telephonic communications, which have the immediacy of the voice and the economy of amorous telegrams; the number of figures based on sonority, such as the puns and alliterations; phonetic spelling (ta gueule dévadée); the very rhythm of the prose that sometimes recalls song. But here again, another temptation, a certain kind of poetry, is avoided by the narrator’s double, this “Rimbaud of the snows” which he evades (Dév-Adé) through derision: “en sauntant [sautant] des minettes en levrette dans les toilettes des discothèques.”¹⁷

The identity of Bottom in Dévadé is almost entirely overshadowed by the development of his function as narrator. But this is a narrator whose essential work consists of deposing and decentralizing his own status in order to liberate multivocality. Superimposed on the story, he has created word-characters, each of whom has a recognizable voice and sound. Which allows him to state cheerfully, “I ruined the plot,” even while repeating as a leitmotif, “Je le dis comme je le pense.” One variation on the phrase even elicits satisfaction: “Je le dis comme je le pense, ravi de ma performance.”

There is no better way to characterize the book’s success, as a language experience that is creation, re-creation, and performance: the former owes as much to spontaneous speech, to the materiality of the signifiers, as to the various resources of the social languages. The novelist has modulated this “puff pastry of languages,” this Ducharmian, which is the most beautiful of his fictions. It is a total language, not made from an equalizing and “foreign” lingua franca but from particularities of language pushed to their limits and without hierarchical pretensions. Such joyous relativization and mobility of prose, in addition to being signs of the work’s maturity, eloquently illustrate Bakhtin’s metaphor of the linguistic marketplace. After all, this language is not so far from Bérénician—the language imagined in the first novel—with its method of conjugating to be and to have together (“Me casse pas, je suis tout ce que j’ai,” says Bottom), but especially with its way of treating words as though they were orchestral instruments. We cannot help thinking as well of the startling use that Ducharme (alias Roch Plante) makes of everyday objects, even of trash, in his sculptures and paintings that are a kind of eulogy to the composite. Here we find actualized, through multilingualism, the playful and poetic functions of language.

Volkswagen Blues by Jacques Poulin offers another example of linguistic proposition. Constructed entirely in the mode of ambivalence, the novel is an interaction between place and what takes place, that is, between an anteriority and potential actualization of that anteriority through a journey that clearly takes on the aspect of a quest. The anteriority is marked by the map. Or rather, it is fixed under a triple inscription: the postcard from the hero’s brother, Théo, which features the account of Cartier, the French explorer who discovered Canada, and the account itself inscribed on the walls of the Musée de Gaspé, next to a geography map of America “where one could see the huge territory that belonged to France in the mid-eighteenth century, a territory that extended from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico and that, to the west, reached as far as the Rocky Mountains: it was incredible and very moving to look at.” The narrative thus revolves around a double pretext: rediscovering the tracks of the brother Théo and, at the same time, following the trail of the French explorers such as Louis Jolliet, Father Marquette, and Cavelier de la Salle, who traversed America. Theo’s old postcard thus leads to a reactualization of “the great American dream.” For the two new Canadian wanderers, Jack Waterman and his mixed-blood companion, nicknamed “la Grande Sauterelle,” “it was as if all dreams were still possible.” We move from travel account—Cartier’s—to travel invitation.

This is a mythic voyage just as the first one was, the stakes of which are nothing less than the rediscovery of America. It is a voyage coupled with a detective story: the actual, physical search for Théo. The characters experience an ordinary journey as well, since they transport with them, in a well-traveled Volkswagen minibus, their everyday world. And finally, the novel is a voyage of initiation, the key to which is offered by the graffiti inside the minibus: “Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins.” This line from Heidegger’s Brief über den Humanismus says that “language is the house of being.” It serves as an epigraph in a novel that proposes travel through languages, a voyage into a multilingual space that the protagonists try their best to domesticate. Despite its affirmative structure, the sentence reads as a question addressed to the readers, a journey they themselves will have to take, following the rhythm of the story’s stops, a puzzle left to them to figure out, beginning with the clues provided them.

How is each of these stories articulated? The reader actually realizes very quickly that the initial dual quest is also a competing quest. To the extent that the detective story progresses, in fact, it negates the mythic story and undermines its importance if not its project. The police files and newspaper investigations reveal that Theo was arrested for weapons possession and for having attacked a museum guard, while attempting to steal a map, to be precise. At the end of the book, when the meeting with brother Théo takes place in front of a metro station, Jack approaches and says in French, “It’s Jack! It’s your brother!” The other one, paralyzed and in a wheelchair, “recoils and in a trembling voice” responds, in English, “I don’t know you.”

Thus this novel of beginnings is also the story of an ending, a sort of anti-epic. Picking up Route 101, which takes him to the airport, the hero no longer has anywhere to go but home.¹⁸ Nevertheless, despite the failure of the proposed dual quest, the journey takes place and America gets crossed. The everyday story prevails over the mythic and detective stories, thanks largely to Jack’s métis companion, an expert mechanic and skilled navigator, able to adapt to all travel conditions. She is the one who articulates the story’s final level in the end, that is, the initiation journey, the journey in and through writing. Thus the novel is less one of impossible rediscovery than of the writer who posits writing as wandering, as absolute unknowing, through a mixture of already existing texts and unpredictable everyday life.

In the light of this last level of narrative, we must then look again at what appears on the surface to be a negative isotopy of language, that is, “the Blues” of a lost language, in this case, French in America. The writer’s stance that Jack Waterman takes is that of a spectator watching his characters, “intervening as little as possible.” This is also someone who, at the outset, admits to knowing nothing. After being interrogated by the Customs officer, the hero asks (in English):

“Was I suspected because I’m a writer?”

“No. Because you don’t seem to know anything,” said the girl.

“Maybe that’s why I’m a writer,” quipped Jack.

The French of the narration is standard French, as is Jack Waterman’s, who also knows all the technical automobile terms and likes to decline place names. In addition, there is the referentiary French of Jacques Cartier’s ancient text, the story’s point of departure, and the very restricted use of the vernacular, limited to crisis situations.

Other languages participate as well. Amerindian languages are represented, in the mythic mode, by the—concealed—first name of the young woman, Pitsémine, the allusion to Kateri Tékakouitha, the list of tribal names, and the toponymy of America in general. But the language that is omnipresent in the narrative, to the point of short-circuiting French as the franca lingua, is, without question, English. English gets assigned all the known functions of language, from mythic—the El Dorado legend is read in Chapman’s The Golden Dream; the hero’s pseudonym is Jack Waterman¹⁹—to the referential (many of the cited books and films, as well as writers’ names) to the vernacular (certain dialogues) and vehicular.²⁰ It is interesting to note that mimetism is only one of the intended effects of the language shifts or code-switches in the novel. In many instances, switching the code has a parodic or ironic effect, emphasizing the arbitrary nature of signs and signaling a striking divergence from the various marking methods of the realist aesthetic. Just as striking is the practice of bilingualism displayed by some of the hero’s interlocutors. These encounters give rise to metalinguistic commentaries as well. A veritable dialogue on translation is touched off by the word, “ramble.”

“Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins,” says the inscription inside the Volkswagen, provisional “house” of the protagonists. Isn’t it necessary to see this phrase, given in German and evoking the book’s title, expressed in English, as an invitation to travel—wander—in language and languages? It is a wandering from which the brother Théo has excluded himself by opting for the language of the obvious and the majority: “I don’t know you.” As fiction, the language of the narrative is an exploration, one that allows conventional limits to be surpassed and transforms the social prohibition—“no trespassing”—into textual transgression: “‘Look! Trespassing’s not allowed!’ laughed Jack.” As the story of travel between a mythic past and a deceptive present—the blues of the lost language—this American fable, invented by a novelist whose first occupation is translation, proposes a form of colingualism and the utopia of a possible reterritorialization of languages in writing.

Thus, Quebecois literature displays the external signs of successful decolonization. But since we cannot speak of true colonization, either by France or, a century later, by the English language, it is difficult to adopt a postcolonial model to describe how it currently functions. Politically, the question remains perpetually open. Culturally, despite the evident autonomy Quebecois literature enjoys from an institutional perspective, we must nevertheless acknowledge that, to a certain extent, it is always dependent on the French network of legitimization and sanctioning for its presence in the larger francophone world. Thus it seems to me that the more adequate term for describing the complexity and originality of Quebecois literature is “pericolonialism,” which indicates that this literature remains peripheral in the whole of francophonia, as well as in relationship to the colonialist or postcolonialist axis, or any other dualistic thinking that minimizes the many networks of affiliations and influences that traverse and shape it. This concept coincides with what Rowland Smith calls “side-by-sidedness.”²¹ A discourse of complicity/resistance is superimposed on the counterdiscourse that characterizes postcolonial literatures, or if you will, a discourse of displacement, as if it were a matter of shifting over a step, just to one side, and tracing new trajectories.

The term pericolonialism takes into account the fact that Quebecois literature has never, strictly speaking, been a colonial literature, that it has been able to mix with other languages without letting itself be assimilated by them. In this literature-laboratory, there are many points of intersection with other contexts but Quebecois literature can hold its own against more institutionalized cultural entities, and this helps explain the peculiar Quebecois model, a model devoted to creative disquiet (intranquillité créatrice).²²

This textual data suggests a kind of language experimentation that leads to new forms of interactions between languages and constitutes many modulations of the multilingualism that Bakhtin described as inseparable from the art of the novel. Indeed we find here as much heterology (varieties in register) and heterophony (diversity of voice), as heteroglossy (diversity of languages). We are also free to read in these practices, which decenter, rupture, transgress, and implicate the status of languages and literature, examples of hybridization and postcolonial “impurity.” Such strategies demonstrate that a literature can, at the same time, bear its communal codes and propose a dialectic among language, culture, and identity.²³ In these texts, susceptible to the tremors of language and to polysemous vertigo, we see emerging the utopia of a domesticated Babel. The novel as it is being written in Quebec today is a traversal of tongues and an inquiry into the function of language.