(1976)
Marie-Claire Blais is undoubtedly the Quebec writer best-known outside Quebec. In fact, it is perhaps through her work, especially the much-praised A Season in the Life of Emmanuel and The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange, that Quebec itself is best-known outside Quebec, at least as a country of the imagination. She is almost unique among Quebec writers in that her work has been translated into twelve languages. She has won France’s most coveted literary prize, the Prix Medicis, as well as several other awards, and she’s drawn the attention of numerous critics, most importantly the late Edmund Wilson, who singled her out for special praise in his book O Canada.
Her reputation has been fairly earned. The dozen or so novels, the several volumes of poetry, the seven plays for stage or radio she’s written during her brief but incandescent career display an astonishing range of style and subject, from the experimental and dream-like to the grimly realistic, from the bleak lives of impoverished children on Quebec’s back streets to the convoluted philosophical musings of Baudelarian social outcasts who choose crime or suicide as their only means of protest. Although sometimes intimidated by the uncompromising nature of her books, critics have always been dazzled by their brilliance of execution.
This brilliance was apparent early. Blais made her literary debut in 1959 at the age of nineteen, with La Bêlle Bete (Mad Shadows), an hallucinatory tale of jealousy, hatred, mutilation and incest set in a lurid and only semi-real rural Quebec. The contrast between her age and her subject matter was sensational, and she was treated as a “discovery,” both in Quebec and in English Canada. Much was made of her background of comparative poverty, her shoeboxes full of novels, her lack of formal education —she’d dropped out of school at fifteen and taken secretarial jobs in order to support herself—and the precocious intensity of her writing. Some critics saw her as a young genius, others as a child prodigy who would burn out early. It took her several years and as many novels to recover from her initial notoriety and prove herself as a serious writer.
It’s paradoxical that a writer whose name has been so closely associated with the Quebec cultural renaissance, the “quiet revolution” of the early sixties, one who was recognized abroad as its major and sometimes as its only literary voice, should have spent these important years outside the country. But her exile was not intentional. She went where her fortunes took her: first to Paris on a Canada Council grant, where she underwent the painful experience of being treated as a hopeless provincial in the city regarded at that time as the French cultural Mecca; then to New England, where she mingled with the Cape Cod artistic community and taught herself English by reading the novels of Jane Austen; later to Brittany, where she lived and wrote on a communal seven-acre farm. But although she was not physically present in Quebec, she was certainly there in spirit, and no one who has read the work of Jacques Ferron, Roch Carrier or Rejean Ducharme, to name a few, can doubt her right to membership in the Quebec literary community. In the past fifteen years, Quebec has evolved a manner as well as a matter which is unique and unmistakable, and Marie-Claire Blais has been central to that evolution.
She has recently moved back to Quebec, where she is currently re-establishing her roots and becoming acquainted with the new Quebec which came into being during her absence. For her there are two Quebecs. The old one was characterized by brutality, suffering and repression, symbolized by those sadistic nuns and slightly mad priests, those hulking, child-beating farmers and the tubercular urban poor that haunt her books. This was, at least in part, the Quebec of her own convent-educated childhood. For her it was a society that specialized in judging, condemning and punishing, and, although as a novelist she might be expected to feel some regret at the disappearance of a society that has provided so much of her own subject matter, she is not sorry to see it go. The new Quebec, she thinks, is a far different place: vibrant, alive, with a new confidence and freedom. But although she is enthusiastic about the changes, she is less certain about the intense political activity and awareness that brought at least some of them into being. Writers, she feels, should observe and record; they cross the line into political involvement at their own peril: “A writer is a temoin, a witness,” she has said. “Dogmatism closes a writer off.”
In some ways, St. Lawrence Blues is the first book in which Blais has attempted to bridge the gap between the old Quebec and the new one, to show representatives of both encountering each other, disputing, reacting. As such it’s a very ambitious work, wide in scope, swarming with characters, aiming for breadth as well as depth. Blais has done many detailed studies of single characters, but St. Lawrence Blues is populous and many-faceted.
It’s a fresh departure for her in other ways as well. She has always been amazingly versatile, switching with ease from romantic fantasy to novels of ideas to psychological studies to carefully-drawn social chronicles. But St. Lawrence Blues is none of these. The predominant note is satire. It’s not a totally new element for Blais, as her previous work has often contained satirical and even humorous interludes; but these were asides, whereas in St. Lawrence Blues the tone is constant.
The book takes the reader on a tour through the seamy layers of present-day Quebec. The narrator is a Quebecois Everyman, an amiable minor rascal and self-proclaimed nonentity nicknamed Ti-Pit, “little nobody.” Ti-Pit is an orphan who feels he belongs nowhere. Earlier in his life he’s been put through one of these repressive nun-run orphanages so familiar to the readers of Blais; later, he’s been hired out to a brutal farmer. Now he’s a drifter, living in roominghouses, working at degrading jobs until he can no longer stand them, getting by however he can. Everything interests him but he trusts nobody; consequently he is close-mouthed with his friends and associates, but carries on a constant silent conversation with himself. St. Lawrence Blues is the transcription of this oral diary, and it’s evident from its verbal richness, astute commentary and improvised fantasies that despite his stunting and dehumanizing background Ti-Pit has somehow been able to retain both his mother-wit and his humanity.
Through his shrewd yet innocent eyes we are allowed to view a wide assortment of Quebecois, some sinister, some grotesque, some pathetic: Baptiste, an old-style working class drudge who is finally rewarded for his years of slavery at the Rubber Company by being fired so the boss won’t have to give him a pension; his son Ti-Guy, an incurable addict, despised and neglected by his conservative father just as the father has been despised by society; Vincent, the worker-priest, constantly defrauded by those he tries to help; Mere Fontaine, the motherly, sentimental owner of Ti-Pit’s boardinghouse, who steeps herself in police and murder literature and lives vicariously through her tenants, which include Mimi, a babyfaced female impersonator, Lison, a pregnant nymphomaniac, and two fifteen-year-old lesbian prostitutes, Josee and Monique. Through a chance encounter in a tavern, Ti-Pit is introduced to a side of Quebec life new to him: he meets Papillon, a verbose, self-aggrandizing poet who wants Ti-Pit to teach him joual, the language of the people, so he can use it to further his own literary ambitions. Papillon’s friends include a shady lawyer from Quebec City who is writing a pornographic novel, Corneille the publisher, and Papineau, named ironically for a nineteenth century Quebec patriot, a phoney Marxist ascetic who demonstrates his own ideological purity by attacking that of his friends, and forces his wife to live on rice while he himself is having a secret affair with a lush rich-living Westmount matron. Papillon’s wife is involved in a peculiar brand of Quebec feminism: she and her friends storm the Men Only section of Ti-Pit’s tavern, disrupting a few old alcoholics and proclaiming their right to drink Molson’s on an equal footing. Papillon himself is annoyed by this because he feels she’s stolen his own political cause by becoming even more joualonese than he himself has been able to. The bourgeoise intelligentsia in St. Lawrence Blues treat political ideas as if they are dog bones, squabbling over sole possession; a situation familiar to anyone who has watched the ultra-nationalist fringes in the rest of Canada during the past few years.
These people are all diversions for Ti-Pit: fascinating and amusing, but not central to his real life. His own past reappears in the form of Ti-Cul, his best friend from orphanage days. Whereas Ti-Pit has adjusted to his half-life by trying to stay out of trouble, Ti-Cul is a savage pessimist who has embraced it. He writes violent, bitter letters to Ti-Pit from prison, and when he gets out he butchers the farmer who once victimized them both. Instead of applauding, Ti-Pit finds the crime sickening and rejects Ti-Cul’s efforts to involve him. He too has hated the farmer for his brutality, but he does not see greater brutality as the proper response. He is not interested in the role of the romantic rebel, or indeed in any of the roles being played out by those around him.
Blais brings all the elements of her broad social canvas together at the end of the book in a giant demonstration against social injustice, which is supposed to be heroic but instead turns into a combination of farce and tragedy. The groups of demonstrators, including nuns, prostitutes, students, fishermen, homosexuals, and even some disgruntled policemen who feel the public is not grateful enough, wallow about in the ever-present snow, exchange insults, scuffle and shout each other down until the police break up the march with needless viciousness, killing a student in the process. Only then can the bewildered and injured treat each other with anything resembling kindness and humanity. For Blais, ideology separates, suffering unites.
Reading St. Lawrence Blues is like listening to the many voices of Quebec arguing among themselves. It’s a domestic argument, and as such, parts of it are not totally comprehensible to an outsider. There are private grudges, puns on names and titles, snide references, innuendos and complicated in-group jokes. But like all domestic arguments, it provides more intimate and in many ways more accurate insights into the personalities of those concerned than their polished official facades would ever give away. This is the book of a culture laughing at itself; though as befits a colonized culture, the laughter is not totally lighthearted, not without bitterness and a characteristic Quebecois sense of macabre irony.
It’s important to remember that St. Lawrence Blues was originally called Un Joualonais, Sa Joualonie, a title whose virtual untranslatability underlines not only the courage of the translator but the nature of the special situation the book deals with. Ti-Pit’s kingdom, his “joualonie” is a colony within a colony within a colony: the lower classes oppressed by the rich French within Quebec and by the English who control both of them, oppressed in their turn by their economic position vis-à-vis the United States. “Maitres Chez Nous,” the rallying-cry of the early Separatist Movement, indicates what was lacking; a sense of control over one’s own cultural and economic destiny. Joual is the language spoken by the “joualonie” (the term comes from a dialect form of the French word “cheval”, the language of the man on the street, the “little guy,” the “assholes” who demonstrate at the end of the book.
And here there’s a joke within a joke, for Blais herself has been criticized by certain ultra-joualonist Quebec literary figures for her early work and its lack of purity according to their standards. For them joual is a shibboleth: those who speak it pass, those who don’t fail. But in St. Lawrence Blues Blais out-jouals the most ardent joualonists, thereby proving that she can do it too, while at the same time jumping these pretensions through hoops of her own construction.
Every character in the book is defined by his or her relationship to this language. Ti-Pit himself is a natural inhabitant of “joualonie,” and its logical product. Papillon the poet, on the other hand, has had to learn it—his own language would have been a more Parisian middle-class French —and like all converts he overdoes it: he speaks it self-consciously, proclaiming its virtues at every turn and sprinkling his conversation with oaths such as “holy pyx” and “bleeding veronica” in a way that makes the strictly-trained Ti-Pit blink. Papillon is a linguistic purist; at one point he picks a fight over an English-language restaurant, declaring, “Revolution, the dignity of our people, is a matter of details, of bacon and eggs.” He longs to be accepted as one of the people and writes in what he considers to be “pure” joual; yet he is constantly being attacked by those further to the left. One of his most crushing humiliations comes when he has an affair with a Parisienne, who has trouble understanding his accent, calls him a “noble savage,” and patronizes him in much the same way that he himself patronizes Ti-Pit.
The irony of the Quebec situation as depicted in St. Lawrence Blues is that the real joualonese, the natives, don’t care about their language. If they think about it at all, it’s as a sign of their lack of education, their oppression, their inability to make themselves understood. The most poignant example of this is Ti-Foin (“little hay” or “hayseed”), a poor farmer’s son who has come to Montreal because he couldn’t stand the wretchedness of life at home. “I want to talk to you like a man,” he says; then he bursts into tears, declaring that he has no words because nobody has given him any. It is only the petit-intelligentsia who idealize joual, while at the same time using it to score points against one another and exploiting it for their own ideological or artistic ends. Their world is permeated with an inverse snobbery which Ti-Pit himself cannot understand. He admires the big cars and plush apartments of the intelligentsia, as well as the contents of their overstocked refrigerators, but he has little use for their slogans.
However, St Lawrence Blues is far from being simply a political allegory. Ti-Pit is a fully developed character in his own right, and it’s against his very human personality that the frivolity, viciousness and bloodless idealism of the others are measured. His motives are simple: he wants to be happy, to get as much as he can from life, despite its limited prospects. Behind his protective cynicism and his taciturn exterior, he has a love of words and of what they can describe, and a practical charity most of the other characters lack. As he is a bastard and an orphan himself, he sympathizes with underdogs of all kinds; he even defends Ti-Cul the murderer. He dislikes the death, violence and squalor which surround him, and resists the despair of Ti-Guy, the hatred and destructiveness of Ti-Cul and the nihilism of his co-worker the ambulance-driver, for whom all human life is worthless and expendable. Despite much evidence that would refute him, he believes that “life is better than limbo.”
The novel’s loosely-constructed, frenetic and sometimes wandering narrative is held together by one single thread: Ti-Pit’s search for a sense of self-worth, for an identity. His real name is not Ti-Pit at all: it is Abraham Lemieux, and someone calls him by this name for the first time in his life at the beginning of the novel. “Ti-Pit” means “nobody;” Abraham Lemieux, however, has quite a different connotation. Abraham was the father of a people, and “Lemieux” means “the best.” “Come to think of it,” Ti-Pit remarks, “Lemieux has a noble, cheerful ring…. ” Throughout his wanderings and encounters, Ti-Pit is looking for some element in his society which will recognize him, and implicitly all those like him, as something more than a bastard and orphan, something more than a nobody. But those of his own class are too helpless, too twisted by cruelty, or too hard-pressed by practical necessities, and the bourgeoise intelligentsia are presented as clowns or absurdities who have lost touch with human realities in their worship of abstractions. Perhaps, Blais may be suggesting, it is Abraham Lemieux and the qualities he represents —hardwon experience, charity, practical wisdom and a tolerant love of life—who will “father” the emerging society of Quebec. But it’s a vague and tenuous hope. At the end of the book, Ti-Pit dreams of meeting Papillon, as he did in the opening chapter. Papillon calls him by his joual nickname, and Ti-Pit replies, “Ti-Pit, never heard of him… my name is Abraham, Abraham Lemieux.” But as Ti-Pit himself remarks, it is only a dream.
Blais may be hinting that joual and the impoverished kingdom of joualonie will have to be changed, renounced, even obliterated, before its inhabitants can attain the human dignity for which they seek. But that event is a long way off, even in imagination, for men like Ti-Pit, who must experience the social conditions which have formed joualonie, who can react to them as one reacts to a kick, but who, lacking credible leaders, do not have the power to change them. On this level, St. Lawrence Blues is more than an amusing satire. Hidden beneath its surface, as Abraham Lemieux is hidden beneath the surface of Ti-Pit, is the threat of revolution.