What is Québécois Literature?

Front matter

What is Québécois Literature?

Reflections on the Literary History of Francophone Writing in Canada

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 28

Contents

List of Tables vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction I Chronology 26 t How has the literary history of francophone Canada been told in the twentieth century? 43 2 Literary history in the curriculum 103 3 The literary anthology as a tool of literary history 139

4 What does a nation-shaped literary history exclude from within and beyond Quebec? 177

Conclusion: Is there a future for francophone Canadian literary history/ies? 205 Notes 211 Bibliography 255

Introduction

The question ‘What is québécois literature?’ may seem innocent and answerable. But, as is the case with many simple questions, the answer is not simple. As my subtitle suggests, the question provokes not answers but further queries and reflections. The shift from ‘québécois’ to ‘francophone writing in Canada’ emphasizes the problematic nature of terminology and classification in this field. As will be seen, the term ‘la littérature québécoise’ was only coined in the mid-r96os, in the very specific context of Quebec’s Révolution tranquille. If I choose to use the cumbersome phrase ‘francophone writing in Canada’ it is because it is a rather more accurate term to refer to the historical, geographical and generic range of literature written in French in Canada, within and beyond Quebec, by authors mostly but not exclusively of European descent. What constitutes ‘literature’ in francophone Canada varies from one historical period to another. As will be seen in Chapter 3, in the nineteenth century the term might be used to include sermons, speeches and works of history, whereas literature as taught in schools in the twenty-first century falls into four main genres: poetry (and song), prose fiction (the novel and shorter forms), theatre and essay. The predominance of religious and political rhetoric in nineteenth-century Quebec highlights the ways in which literary histories are a cultural product and serve a specific, local purpose. The literary canon of one culture is not a simple transposition from another. The chapters that follow will demonstrate the ways in which religion and politics have played an active role in shaping and mediating a particular canon to francophone Canada. Literary historians also make very different choices in the balance between genres within the canon which they construct. This may result in part from the status of the literature of France in the literary education of francophone Canadians, at least up to the 1960s, for whom the fables of La Fontaine and the works of seventeenth-century French dramatists represented unsurpassable models of literary achievement. Theatre in particular is neglected in the literary histories of francophone Canada, as Lucie Robert, for example, has pointed out.! This gap has to an extent been filled by literary histories and anthologies devoted to specific genres, whose own historiography has yet to be studied.?

However, this book will not track the way in which different genres have emerged and established themselves within the literary field, nor does it aim to offer an alternative literary history; rather it will reflect on the construction, function and operation of literary history in francophone Canada. It will explore the different ways in which the history of literary writing in French has been told, and the role played by education in the mediation of that literature. It will study how the narrative and the function of literary historical works have changed as the francophone Canadian population has moved from a colonial past to a postcolonial present and as the rise of Québécois nationalism has both strengthened and polarized not only the francophone population but also francophone literary culture within and beyond Quebec. In order to examine the phenomenon of literary history I shall be taking a number of pathways. These pathways follow a diachronic route in most cases but they operate on different types of material and view these from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the close examination of individual textbooks or curriculum statements to the comparison of a selection of volumes of literary history, and to the discussion of areas of the wide literary field of francophone literature in Canada which tend to be under-represented in the narrative of la littérature québécoise today. These pathways will not together compose a complete picture of the literary history of francophone Canada, but they aim to open up the field and explore its potential for the future as well as some of the directions it has taken in the past.

My argument takes as its starting point the view that literary history is never neutral, never comprehensive, is as much about the present as the past, and has adopted and adapted a variety of methodologies over time and to suit different contexts. Any literary history maps a territory not only by what it includes, but by what it excludes. That begins with the way we choose to delineate a corpus or tradition of literature. What specific territory is implied or evoked when one speaks of the history of la littérature canadienne de langue française, of la littérature québécoise, of la littérature acadienne, la littérature franco-ontarienne or la littérature amérindienne francophone? Each of these terms suggests a different mapping, a different narrative, and also a different historical context, structure or periodization. Bhabha argues that literary histories ‘are part [...] of the negotiable field of meanings, signs, and symbols, that is associated with national culture, national identity, national life’.* The very notion of a national narrative takes on a particular complexity in the context of colonial and postcolonial cultures. As Said argues: ‘Nations themselves are narratives. The power to narrate or to block other narratives from forming and emerging is very important to culture and to imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.* The reliance on national(ist) tropes has influenced the construction of literary histories of francophone writing in Canada in various ways. While recognizing the energizing role of Quebec nationalism in the emergence and affirmation of québécois literature in the second half of the twentieth century, it is also important to analyse the effects of such a narrative on the shape of literary history, on its focus, its inclusions and exclusions. If literary history became the site of contesting theoretical and ideological approaches in the 1960s and 19708, the writing of literary histories has become still more problematic in the twenty-first century. The last three decades have seen further shifts and tensions working their way through the field of literary history in francophone Canada as a result of two opposed developments: the undermining of the national in favour of global movements and the proliferation of alternative, local, minority histories. In many ways the literary field has become ever more open and inclusive in its recognition of minority literatures and genres which target particular readerships; at the same time, many of the traditional components and methodologies of literary history (including categorization by period or genre and the notion of canon) have been undermined and questioned. Huggan asks whether literary histories ‘with their conceptual legacies of continuity and coherence, can accommodate such postcolonial/postmodern disruptions, such global flows and internal fissures’.°

The first part of this introduction will discuss the nature and function of literary history, its underlying assumptions, its various narratives and its component parts. In particular it will consider the problematic nature of the focus on nation that has typified literary history since the nineteenth century, nationhood and nationalism being central to any discussion of the literature of a colonized population. What might a postcolonial history of literature achieve? It might expose and challenge some of the underlying assumptions and biases of earlier literary histories and the ways in which literary history has performed an ideological function. Equally it might reveal some of the omissions and the marginalizations which in themselves are telling in terms of colonial and postcolonial analysis.

The second part of the introduction will go on to consider how the writing of the literary history of francophone Canada has responded to a very particular colonial situation; francophones of European descent are both colonizers (of the indigenous population since first permanent French settlement in North America in 1604) and colonized (by the British after their victory on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which ceded New France to British rule). Given the variety of ways in which the production and dissemination of literature in French may have been conditioned by its colonial context, it will be useful to consider how patterns of colonial domination, between Europe and Canada and within Canada, have inflected the histories of francophone literature in Canada. Work in the area of postcolonial studies provides fruitful insights into many of the issues raised.

What is literary history?

Literary history is an activity that can take a variety of forms; traditionally these have included the chronological narrative account in one or more volumes; the anthology of extracts, representing the corpus of a literature; the encyclopaedia, repertoire or dictionary of writers or works. To this basis of what are essentially treated as reference works (but constructed in very particular ways and to particular ends by their authors, editors and readers) can be added academic works that are literary historical in function and methodology (bibliographies, theses, monographs, articles, etc.) and more recently web-based material including databases, reading lists and websites. Before turning to study the case of francophone Canada more closely it is important to clarify what it is that literary history does and how it has responded to recent challenges.

In Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism Graham Huggan outlines one of the many paradoxes that arise from the study of literary history: ‘There are few pursuits less fashionable yet more contentious than literary history. What is this outdated discipline that continues, in spite of itself, to be so up-to-date?” The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen a range of discussions about the function and the plausibility of literary history. Literary history in the Western tradition has its origins in nineteenth-century Europe. Under the influence of Herder, the Schlegel brothers and Mme de Staël literary histories were structured according to a developmental argument, presented as a narrative thread, which David Perkins sees as enduring into modern-day literary histories: ‘the assumption that the various genres, periods, schools, traditions, movements, communicative systems, discourses, and epistemes are not baseless and arbitrary groupings, that such classifications can have objective and valid grounds in the literature of the past, is still the fundamental assumption of the discipline, the premise that empowers it’.’ The use of the term ‘discipline’ by both Huggan and Perkins suggests that literary history operates as a distinctive, definable area of knowledge. Yet as Perkins points out, literary history has adopted many different methodologies which are drawn from a range of disciplines. Looking back at some of the ways in which literary history has been practised, he concludes: ‘Its major modes have been Hegelian, naturalist, positivist, geistesgeschichtlich, Marxist, formalist, sociological and, paradoxically, postmodern.” (It is worth noting that in 1992 Perkins does not add the term ‘postcolonial’ to his list of approaches.)

Such methodological approaches have been applied to a variety of corpuses from the literature of a nation, a region or a period, to the literature produced by a certain class, or by a specific ethnic or minority group. The resulting ‘histories’ may focus on the means of production and circulation of such bodies of work, their reception, their social or political impact, their readership or their literary forms. The very term ‘literary history’ exposes a central tension within literary histories, that of a relationship assumed to exist between the two terms ‘literature’ and ‘history’. Is literary history a history of literary forms, literary themes, literary language, or is it an analysis of the relationship between a specific history (material, social, political, cultural or intellectual) and its literary production? In either case, to what extent does the construction of a literary history depend upon notions of causality or genealogy? The picture is further complicated by the distinction between the activities proper to literary history, literary criticism, or indeed, the history of literature. As will be seen in Chapter 1, some literary histories tend much more towards literary criticism, others privilege historical context or the social and economic conditions of literary production to the detriment of the individual literary text. In Perkins’ view, ‘historical contextualism can interpret and account for elements of texts by referring them to relevant bits of the social and literary matrix, but it cannot grasp texts as aesthetic designs”.

While both Perkins and Huggan, from their different perspectives, are sceptical about the fundamental premises of literary history, neither of them is willing to dismiss such projects entirely. For Perkins the impossibility of the project of literary history is a product of our age: ‘we cannot write literary history with intellectual conviction, but we must read it. The irony and paradox of this argument are themselves typical of our present moment in history. ® For Huggan, while the traditional project of literary history is marked by its imperialist origins and the myth of a unified nation, the writing of literary history, informed by postcolonial and postmodernist approaches, is a valuable, if highly problematic, enterprise. Such caveats and paradoxes will apply to the following discussion of literary history and its application to the field of francophone literature in Canada.

While it would be difficult to argue that literary history constitutes a distinct discipline, given the range of forms and methods which it adopts, a number of central features recur by which we can recognize the genre. The writing of literary history involves the delimitation of a field of study in terms of space, time, language and genre. Whether the literature typically relates to a country (Brazil), a region (Brittany), a number of territories linked by language (la francophonie) or some other spatially defined category (the francophone diaspora in North America), its scope needs to be defined, and questions of eligibility for inclusion have to be addressed (involving criteria such as place of birth, period of residence, language of expression, etc.). Literary history requires a choice of periodization: the account must begin somewhere in history and must have a cut-off date; this time span is then typically divided into a number of shorter periods, or stages, based on historical events, on cultural and literary movements or developments, or some combination of the two. While the majority of literary histories study a corpus of literature written in one particular language, comparative studies of works in two or more languages exist, as do studies of the literature of a country in which a number of linguistic communities engage in literary production.!! The literary historian must select a corpus of works; in the process of selection, some texts are omitted, whether because they are deemed to be of lower quality, to be less representative, or to fail to correspond to the model which the literary historian is constructing. The selection process in turn relies on a certain understanding of what constitutes ‘literature’, both over time (as genres develop and move into or out of the sphere of the ‘literary’) and across the range of popular, minority and high culture. Through repetition and dissemination, the works and genres most frequently selected or most fully discussed will tend to become part of a literary canon associated with that particular body of literature. Once the material has been selected it has to be classified, organized and presented to the reader. In addition to the main body of text, literary histories are often accompanied by paratextual material such as prefaces, indexes, bibliographies and appendices (typically a chronology of relevant historical, literary and cultural events). Each of these processes of selection, classification, organization and presentation poses problems which the literary historian must resolve in some way. As will be seen in Chapter 1, many of these decisions take on particular significance in the case of the history of francophone literature in Canada.

Forms of literary history In Is Literary History Possible? Perkins divides literary histories into two main shapes which he designates as narrative literary history and encyclopaedic literary history. From the nineteenth century onwards narrative literary history has been the dominant form; it has a point of view, presenting texts, events and literary movements as ‘constituents of a discursive form with a beginning, a middle and an end, if it is Aristotelian narration, or with a statement, development, and conclusion, if it is an argument”. This point of view refers not only to the individual or collective values of the authors concerned; as Jonathan Arac argues, ‘The history of literature involves both historiography (“subject”) and historicality (“object”). [...] As historiography, the history of literature is an activity in the present." The narrative draws on notions of causality and coherence in its attempt to give shape to the account. Such notions are often emplotted by means of metaphors (of origin, growth to maturity, victory and defeat). The alternative shape is the encyclopaedic form, which is structured as a series of separate and sometimes short essays or entries on works, authors, movements or aesthetic styles. Multiple authors are usually involved and these authors may well adopt a diverse set of approaches. Before turning to consider the ways in which narrative literary history has been used to construct the nation, the central protagonist of most literary histories of Canada, I wish to explore further the notion of encyclopaedic literary history and discuss the model of reading that it encourages.

One of two examples of encyclopaedic literary histories discussed by Perkins is A New History of French Literature, produced by an editorial team led by Denis Hollier and first published in 1989. Contributions came from 165 scholars, the vast majority of whom were university academics in the USA, each responsible for one, or occasionally more, entries. Entries are arranged chronologically, with dates appearing in various forms (1754?, December 1761, 1914-1918, 6 February 1945). The coverage leaves gaps: the 1890s have three entries while the first decade of the twentieth century has only one. In his introduction to the volume, Hollier comments on the purpose of this choice of structure: it aims to avoid both continuous historical narrative, which ‘artificially homogenizes literature into linear chronologies’, and the alphabetical dictionary, which ‘introduces masses of often irrelevant information’. Individual entries differ vastly in scope, focus and approach but follow a consistent format. After the date there follows a ‘headline’ announcing an event which in turn indicates the point of departure for the more wide-ranging essay that follows under a further heading. The entries for the period 1890-1910 illustrate the layout and typography:

Oscar Wilde Tries to Have His Salomé Performed in London with Sarah Bernhardt in the Title Role

Writing and the Dance

1895 Gustave Lanson Publishes His Histoire de la littérature francaise

Literature in the Classroom

Emile Zola Publishes ‘J’accuse’, an Open Letter to the President of the Republic in Which He Denounces the Irregularities Leading to Dreyfus’ Condemnation

The Dreyfus Affair

1905, 9 December

The Legislative Assembly Passes the Law concerning the Separation of Church and State, Ending the Concordat of 1801

On Schools, Churches and Museums

As is evident, entries may be triggered by literary events or other events which may have literary repercussions, sometimes at a much later date, or which may bring to a head a situation that had long predated the event. Hollier juxtaposes events of a varied nature ‘to produce an effect of heterogeneity and to disrupt the traditional orderliness of most histories of literature: essays devoted to a genre coexist with essays devoted to one book, institutions are presented alongside literary movements, large surveys next to detailed analysis of specific landmarks’ (xix). The volume (over 1,150 pages long) avoids ‘comprehensive’ presentation of authors, periods, genres or movements, each of these appearing through a series of lenses, in different connections and from various perspectives. Such fragmentation is seen by Perkins as preventing the literary historian from offering a sophisticated and coherent understanding of the past: ‘Encyclopedic form is intellectually deficient. [...] Because it aspires to reflect the past in its multiplicity and heterogeneity, it does not organize the past, and in this sense it is not history. There is little excitement in reading it. This is one point of view, but one which I do not share. Perkins suggests that ‘a reader who acquired his information only from A New History of French Literature would not know why Proust is a topic at all. Yet, as can be seen from the examples above, the events chosen have more than anecdotal interest and the reader who follows a path of their own making through the volume, through cross-referencing or searching by author, date or genre, will draw together or contrast a range of types and sources of information. Such a reading supplies what Perkins himself argues cannot be found in a narrative literary history; that is, ‘diverse durations, levels of reality, sequences of events, and multiple points of view”.

Nor is Hollier’s ‘encyclopaedic’ literary history so thoroughly postmodern that narrative does not appear. In fact many of the entries adopt narrative forms and devices found in more traditional literary histories. As the following example illustrates, entries can be read as a series of micro-narratives, rather than a series of fragments. The entry for 1895 written by Antoine Compagnon, ‘Gustave Lanson Publishes His Histoire de la littérature francaise’, leads into an essay entitled ‘Literature in the Classroom’. The author sets the event in a historical context (the longstanding opposition between Benedictines and Jesuits, between philology and rhetoric, and between particularists and generalists; the dominance of rhetoric-based literary study in the Napoleonic universities; the effects of the defeat of 1870 on the status of rhetoric and its displacement by literary history under the Third Republic). Looking forward from 1895 Compagnon then discusses the impact of Lanson’s promotion of literary history throughout the educational establishment, its various distortions, and the 1960s dispute between ‘the old Lansonian Sorbonne and the nouvelle critique [...] which claimed to take its inspiration from Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxist sociology, and so on — that is, from the social sciences’ (823). The entry closes with a reflection on the waning of New Criticism and the ongoing opposition between generalists and particularists. The account is broadly linear; it uses personification and adopts a rhetoric of emergence, conflict, growth and decline in phrases such as the following: ‘After the Revolution [...] particularism took refuge in the Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, while rhetoric flourished in the Napoleonic universities established in 1803’ (819); ‘In 1890 literary studies thus seemed condemned to decline’ (820); ‘[Brunetière] fought the rear-guard struggle’ (820); ‘the destiny of French literary history’ (822); ‘Lanson came at just the right moment’ (821). The historical account includes a final reflection from the moment of writing and its author makes a number of evaluative comments as when he praises Lanson’s 1903 Programme d’études sur l’histoire provinciale de la vie littéraire en France, commenting ‘Unfortunately, this excellent programme was not realized until the Annales historians systematically undertook it during the 1960s’ (822). The reference to la nouvelle critique cited above displays a more ironic narrative voice: ‘which claimed to take its inspiration from Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxist sociology, and so on—that is, from the social sciences’ (823, my emphases).

While encyclopaedic literary histories might draw on various features of narrative literary history within a series of micro-narratives, the apparent fragmentation and incoherence of the volume as a whole can offer the reader a more intellectually stimulating and more open-ended read than does a traditional, linear and didactic literary history. Equally, it should be recognized that many readers of narrative literary histories may well read such histories in a non-linear way; that is they may access the information they require with the index as a guide, using the literary history as a reference work which they read selectively. While segments of the discourse of causality will still emerge from the passages consulted, the overall coherence will be undermined or obscured by such a reading. This can in turn disrupt the narrative thread of the literary history. Narrative and encyclopaedic literary histories should not be understood as opposites (as Perkins himself acknowledges). Rather the two forms should be understood as the extreme points of a spectrum, one which results not only from the format, content and voice of the text but also from the reader’s own construction of the text. In response to his own question about whether literary histories ‘with their conceptual legacies of continuity and coherence, [can] accommodate such postcolonial/postmodern disruptions, such global flows and internal fissures’, Huggan suggests that attempts to write alternative or revisionary literary histories tend to result in a compromise between ‘the various policing

Introduction II mechanisms’ (such as periodization, classification, canon) and new pluralist modes of imagining the nation.

Literary history, the nation and nationalism

While, as E. D. Blodgett argues in Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada, ‘not all literary history is explicitly organized around the nation’, he continues: ‘Somewhere, however, the nation is present, if only implicitly, and in most cases the nation is the dominant!” The presence of the nation as a recurrent figure in literary history dates back to the appearance of national literary histories as a genre, which coincided in the Western world with the rise of nationalist movements in the nineteenth century. According to the German philologist J. G. Herder, it is the possession of a common language that ensures the unity of a people:

Without its own language, a Volk is an absurdity, a contradiction in terms. For neither blood and soil, nor conquest and political fiat can engender that unique consciousness which alone sustains the existence and continuity of a social entity. Even if a Volk’s state perishes, the nation remains intact, provided it maintains its distinctive linguistic traditions.*°

The function of literary history as a tool of nation-building can be seen as a logical development of such a definition of national consciousness. Indeed Herder stresses the important role of education as one means of reinforcing the historical consciousness of a people, a process which will be examined in Chapters 2 and 3.7!

Herder’s notion of a national consciousness was based on the sharing of a common language; modern-day nationhood is more problematic. In the case of Canada, there are of course many ‘national’ histories (of the anglophone settlers, francophone colons colonisés, First Nations, Inuit or ethnic minorities), yet these are not all easily identifiable with a single language. In the case of many communities and individual members of the First Nations population, language has been lost in the process of colonial acculturation. The relationship to language may be further complicated by the bilingualism or plurilingualism, forced or chosen, of individuals and communities. For many communities in Canada, the relationships between nationhood, language and literature are fraught with ambivalence and paradoxes. Blodgett’s study is in part an attempt to destabilize the traditional equating of nation with a shared national idea, the better to recognize the presence of the other (language, ethnicity, minority): ‘Thus the point of the trans-national frame that is not designed so much to internationalize Canada as to open it up to its several selves.’** Sylvia Söderlind also reflects on the way in which any attempt to create a national narrative should be studied as much for what it forgets and what it excludes as what it includes: ‘Any critical practice that uses an adjective like “Canadian” to delimit its object of study is inevitably engaged in a nation-defining, if not a nation-building enterprise, and the inclusions and exclusions effected by a critical community will reveal something about the kind of nation it prefers to imagine.” Such an awareness of the exclusions effected by nation-shaped narratives in literary history is relevant to any culture. But when successive layers of colonization, external and internal, come into play, the writing of a nation-shaped literary history becomes both more urgent and more problematic.

The national, the colonial and the postcolonial

In The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin discuss the characteristic preoccupations of literature in invader-settler societies which they outline as follows: the relationship between social and literary practices in the old world and the new; the relationship between the indigenous population and the incoming settler population; the relationship between their imported language and the new place.” Although the authors are concerned here with invader-settler societies established by British colonization, similar concerns are relevant to the francophone population of Canada, in that the history of their literature can be seen as a process torn between the need to legitimize itself and to differentiate itself in relation to the former colonial power. As Hutcheon points out, the relationship between colony and empire casts a long shadow: ‘the literary histories (like the social histories) of both former colony and former empire are always intrinsically complex, internally and externally relational, and mutually implicated; these qualities make these histories crucial to their nations’ self-understanding’.** In this context the writing of a national literature becomes a significant act, ‘an important element in the establishment of an independent cultural identity’.*° But because of the double layer of colonization under which the French colony was in turn colonized by the British, the relationships shift and become more complex. This ‘doubling’ effect has been used by a number of critics to explore the psyche and the cultural life of the francophone population of Canada. Jean Bouthillette, writing in 1972, describes the effect of British colonization on the national consciousness of French Canadians in just such terms:

Quand nous tentons de nous saisir comme peuple, ou de nous projeter sur le monde, une présence s’interpose. Où que nous regardions, infailliblement nous rencontrons l’Autre — en l’occurrence l’Anglais —, dont le regard trouble notre propre regard. Le Canadien français est un homme qui a deux ombres. Et c’est en vain que nous feignons d’y échapper: l'ombre anglaise nous accompagne toujours et partout. Et dans cette ombre nous devenons ombre.”