The Arts in Canada: The Last Fifty Years 9781487589127

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w.j. KEITH is a member of the Department of English at University College, University of Toronto. B . -z. SHEK is a member of the Department of French at University College, University of Toronto. In this volume a baker's dozen of creative Canadians make personal responses to the state of the arts in Canada: Northrop Frye and Guy Rocher write on general cultural trends; Hugh MacLennan and Gérard Bessette on fiction; Ralph Gustafson and Michèle Lalonde on poetry; Robertson Davies and Gratien Celinas on drama; George Woodcock and Jacques Allard on non-fiction prose; Godfrey Ridout on music; and Aba Bayefsky and Humphrey N. Milnes on art. The essays were written to mark the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the University of Toronto Quarterly. The contributors were invited to discuss the changes, problems, challenges, and achievements in the arts in the last fifty years. Since all the authors had personal experience of at least a large section of the period surveyed, the editors welcomed personal reminiscence as well as description and assessment. The result is a varied group of essays in each of which the character of the individual artist is clearly evident; together, they provide a complex, many-faceted, lively, and living discussion of the cultural development of Canada. This anniversary collection of essays is a valuable and provocative source for courses in Canadian studies and for anyone interested in the development of the arts and humanities in Canada.

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The Arts in Canada: The Last Fifty Years E D I T E D BY W . J . K E I T H AND B . - Z . SHEK

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 1980 Toronto Buffalo London 'Petit Testament/ pp 66-8, © Michèle Lalonde 1980 ISBN 0-8020-0401-7 cloth, 0-8020-6425-6 paper

Contents

Preface vu NORTHROP FRYE

Across the River and Out of the Trees i GUY ROCHER

Un demi-siècle d'évolution culturelle au Québec 15 HUGH MACLENNAN

Fiction in Canada -1930 to 1980 29 GÉRARD BESSETTE

Romancier(s) québécois 43 RALPH GUSTAFSON

New World Northern: Of Poetry and Identity 53 MICHÈLE LALONDE

Petit Testament 66 ROBERTSON DAVIES

Fifty Years of Theatre in Canada 69 GRATIEN CELINAS

Le Crédo professionnel d'un homme de thétre 81 GEORGE WOODCOCK

When the Past Becomes History: The Half-Century in Non-Fiction Prose 90 JACQUES ALLARD

Les Lettres québécoises depuis 1930 102

VI CONTENTS

GODFREY RIDOUT

Fifty Years of Music in Canada? Good Lord, I Was There for All of Them! 116 ABA BAYEFSKY and HUMPHREY N. MILNES

Fields of Force in Canadian Art, 1930 to 1980 135 w.j. KEITH and B.-Z. SHEK A Half-Century of UTQ 146 CONTRIBUTORS 155

Preface

With the academic year 1980-1 the University of Toronto Quarterly enters its fiftieth year of continuous publication. The occasion seemed worth commemorating in a tangible way, and the condition of the artist in Canada during the half-century of the journal's existence offered itself as an attractive and appropriate subject for a critical symposium. It was therefore decided to devote a special issue of the journal to this subject. In consequence we approached distinguished practitioners of a representative selection of the various arts and invited them to compare the cultural situation in 1930 with the immediate prospects in 1980, to discuss the changes, problems, challenges, and achievements of the last fifty years. Since the issue promises to create an interest extending well beyond the regular subscription-list of the journal, we are therefore publishing the collection of essays not only as the first issue in our fiftieth year but also as a book. We decided to leave the format as open as possible so that each contributor could discuss whatever he or she considered most suitable for the subject in question. Since the participants had personal experience of at least a large section of the period surveyed, we made it clear that memoir and anecdote would be welcome, as well as general observation. We wanted the essays to be thoughtful without becoming dryly academic; we saw the need for a series of personal responses on the state of the arts in twentieth-century Canada that carried cumulative authority without taking on the oppressiveness of an official report. The results are to be found in the following pages. What has impressed us as editors is the way in which - despite the fidelity of all contributors to a shared task - the impress of the individual artist is clearly visible in each essay. This is no uniform, coldly objective catalogue of work produced. Some essays may seem either partial or controversial, but each preserves a forthright, sincere, committed view of its subject. Together, they make up a complex, many-faceted, lively, and living discussion of the cultural development of Canada. The University of Toronto Quarterly first saw the light of day at a period of depression and uncertainty; it celebrates its fiftieth birthday in a year of national crisis and self-scrutiny. In its annual 'Letters in Canada' each summer the journal has a long history of responsible critical coverage of

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our achievements in both English and French. In this commemorative volume each of the verbal arts is represented by an essay in each of the official Canadian languages. They appear, appropriately, side by side, and we hope that the sense of combination and co-operation that has made possible this examination of the past offers a happy augury for the future. We are pleased to have this opportunity to render thanks for assistance and support. Several contributions to this volume lay stress on the role played by the Canada Council in developing artistic activity in the last twenty years and more. Like most academic journals, the Quarterly could not have survived without the financial support of the Canada Council and more recently of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and we acknowledge their annual grants with gratitude. Within the University of Toronto itself we are conscious of vital encouragement from the University of Toronto Press, from University College, and from the Departments of English and French, all of whom have been generous of advice and services to the editors in ways too numerous to specify here. Then there are the members of the Honorary Advisory Board and many others who offer help and good counsel on the frequent occasions when we need them. Above all, there are our contributors and our readers, without whom any efforts on our part would be superfluous. As we enter our fiftieth year of publication, closing one long chapter and opening another, we thank them all. WJK and B-ZS

NORTHROP FRYE

Across the River and Out of the Trees

i

The first issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly appeared in 1931. Its appearance was not exactly a breathtaking novelty: Queen's Quarterly and the Dalhousie Review were already in existence, and there had even been an earlier version of the Quarterly itself. But it was an important historical event none the less. The opening editorial statement attached the journal's traditions firmly to those of the 'gentleman's magazine' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was not to be a specialized learned journal: there were already enough of those, the editor implied, perhaps meaning that there were too many. Nor was it to be an outlet for creative talent in poetry or fiction: it published a poem or two at the beginning, but apologized editorially for the digression. It tried to cover a broad spectrum of academic interest for a while, but soon restricted itself in effect to the humanities, though it did not acknowledge this by calling itself 'A Canadian Journal of the Humanities' until some years later. Within a very short time it had inaugurated 'Letters in Canada' as an encyclopaedic critique of everything published in Canada, so for all its exclusion of poetry and fiction it clearly had no intention of slighting the Canadian cultural scene, much less ignoring it. There were some remarkable people first associated with the journal. There was G.S. Brett, the first editor, a philosopher of vast erudition whose History of Psychology is still a standard work on the subject. There was E.K. Broadus, one of an extraordinary group of scholars in Alberta, and an early Canadian anthologist. There was Pelham Edgar, interested mainly in what was then contemporary fiction, author of a pioneering work on Henry James, and deeply concerned with Canadian writing as well. There was E.K. Brown, whose book on Canadian poetry was crucial in consolidating the sense of the context and tone of Canadian poetry up to that time. There was Watson Kirkconnell, whose prolific output and fantastic linguistic abilities enabled 'Letters in Canada' to include a survey of Canadian writing in languages other than English and French, all of which he could read. A malicious but admiring legend said that when he became president of Acadia he took to shaking hands with his left hand so as not to interrupt his writing. An early issue contained an article by Kirkconnell on 'Canada's Leading Poet,' who according to Kirkconnell

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was Stephen Stephansson, a poet living in Manitoba and writing in Icelandic up to his death in 1927. I was preoccupied with getting through my sophomore year when the Quarterly first appeared, and I should perhaps not have been aware of its existence for some time if Brett and Edgar had not been teachers of mine. If I adopt a personal, even to some extent an autobiographical, tone in what follows, the reason is not simple egotism or garrulity: one needs a point of view for a survey, and a personal point of view is the obvious one for a surveyor who has lived entirely within the territory he surveys. In retrospect, the Quarterly's early editorial policy decisions seem to me to have been prophetic of my own interests in criticism, and objectified much of what I have tried to do since. They also seem to me to mark a most significant cultural change, which was among other things a change in the university's relation to society, and which was already taking place, in Canada as elsewhere. The learned journals the Quarterly was separating itself from belonged mainly to the philological tradition, with its headquarters in nineteenthcentury Germany, that had dominated American scholarship for half a century. The scholars who wrote in them generally knew the standard classical and modern languages, and for the most part did not include contemporary literature in their purview - at least not as scholars, whatever their general level of cultivation. Their scholarship thus gave the impression of being an activity independent of the creative life of their time. This was particularly true of Canadian scholars in 1930, many of whom had not only moved to Canada from elsewhere but had done much of their seminal work before they arrived. But the number of university people who gathered around the Canadian Forum, established in 1920, indicated that other things were happening. My own college of Victoria had produced a monument of philological scholarship, Andrew Bell's The Latin Dual and Poetic Diction (1923), a work so obsessively specialized that the classicists themselves hardly knew what to do with it. Yet the genial and urbane scholarship of Douglas Bush, another graduate of Victoria, who in his early years was a lively contributor to the Canadian Forum, grew directly out of this environment. Edgar's contemporary interests I have noted: he also influenced Brown's interest in twentieth-century American and Canadian writing, besides getting E.J. Pratt into his own English department at Victoria. Pratt was not a 'writer in residence/ but a full-time teacher until his retirement, and all the more influential as a link between creative and scholarly interests for both students and colleagues. He was a portent of the modern university's acceptance of some responsibility for encouraging writers and fostering a discriminating public for them. In 1930 Canadian literature was still in a provincial state. Pratt and Morley Callaghan had established themselves as twentieth-century wri-

ACROSS THE RIVER AND OUT OF THE TREES 3

ters, and in 1936 a little anthology of six poets, including Pratt, called New Provinces, indicated that newer and more contemporary poetic idioms were taking shape. Morley Callaghan's books, I think I am right in saying, were sometimes banned by the public library in Toronto - I forget what the rationalization was, but the real reason could only have been that if a Canadian were to do anything so ethically dubious as write, he should at least write like a proper colonial and not like someone who had lived in the Paris of Joyce and Gertrude Stein. More recent scholarship has revealed that there was a good deal of remarkable, even astonishing, writing produced in Canada before 1930, but a mass of writing with good flashes in it is still not a literature. Articles proclaiming the imminent advent of literary greatness had been appearing for a long time, giving to Canadian literature, or its history, the quality that Milton Wilson has described, in a practically definitive phrase, as 'one half-baked phoenix after another.' But the writing that got most direct public response tended to be subliterary rhetoric, like the Confederation poetry which was really inspired by a map and not by a country or a people, or the yawny French verse about the terroir which seemed to be written out of duty rather than discovery. The excuse normally given for this state of affairs was that Canada was a 'young' country, that its priorities had to be material ones, and that literature and the other arts would come along when economic conditions were more advanced. First the primary forms of communication - railways, bridges, canals - then the secondary ones. This argument makes very little sense: seventeenth-century Puritans in Massachusetts wrote poetry and carried on with their pamphlet war against the Anglican establishment. And in a genuinely primitive community, like those of the indigenous peoples, poetry leaps into the foreground as one of the really essential elements of life, along with food and shelter. It was no more 'natural,' and no more in accord with the historical process, for Canada to build the Victoria Bridge or the Welland Canal than to have produced major poets and novelists. But the argument was accepted because it was a mercantilist argument, and was part of Canada's acceptance of its role as a provider of raw materials for manufacture in larger centres. The reverse movement of imported goods brought the standards of culture set up in London and Paris back to the boondocks, and efforts were made there to imitate them. Trying to meet an externally imposed standard in the arts is a futile procedure in itself, and it is obvious that cultural lag is built into it. In nineteenth-century Canadian poetry, for instance, the ostensible echoes may be from Tennyson or Victor Hugo, but the texture of the verse is much closer to James Thomson or Béranger. In 1930, again, the depression settled into Canadian life, and the depression was also a hampering and delaying influence on culture. There was not only the difficulty of getting books and pictures marketed (A. Y.

4 NORTHROP FRYE

Jackson remarked to me some time before his death that he still had guilt feelings when a picture of his sold for more than thirty-five dollars), but a theory of culture developed which was a modified form of mercantilism. According to it the creative person was to produce the raw material of his experience as part of an attempt to affect the ownership of production. There has always been a strong realistic and documentary slant to Canadian writing and painting, for obvious reasons, and this stereotype, after confusing a number of writers and spoiling one or two quite decent painters, hung around for several decades, though it shifted to a more psychological basis in the fifties. Clearly this was still another way of reducing literature to rhetoric, and focusing attention on content, or what a writer thinks he is saying, rather than on what he constructs, or says in spite of himself. When I was reviewing Canadian poetry in the fifties, I noted the emergence of a curiously interconsistent language of symbolism and imagery among the poets who most obviously knew what they were doing. The language had close affiliations with that of contemporary British and American poets, but was a quite distinctive language, a direct response, as I felt, to an environment that was taking on a new significance for them. I have spoken of what I call a garrison mentality and of the alternating moods of pastoral populism and imaginative terror (which has nothing to do with a poet's feeling terrified) in earlier Canadian writing. These were set up mainly as historical markers, like roadside plaques telling a motorist that something happened here two centuries ago, but they also attempted to define elements in a cultural tradition that was taking clearer shape as the contemporary writing matured. For those who felt that a poet ought primarily to express either sexual passion or social indignation, and was doing so if he said he was loudly enough, my comments on the emergence of a new variety of symbolic language sounded like a preference for poetry that was academic and inhibited. I myself felt that a quality was forming in Canadian poetry that I could only call professional. In an immature society culture is an import; for a mature one it is a native manufacture which eventually becomes an export. One thinks of the amount of major literature produced in the last century by Anglo-Irish writers who were certainly not writing for the Dublin or Belfast market. I finished my survey in 1960 convinced that Canadian literature was about to become a phoenix again, and a properly cooked one this time. Well, I think I was right: Canadian literature since 1960 has become a real literature, and is recognized as one all over the world. We are told that there are Canadian authors who sell better in Holland or Germany than they do in their own country - and it has never been fair to say that the Canadian public has ignored its own literature, as far as buying and reading books goes. I doubt if there are any real causes for such a development, but there are some obvious conditioning factors. The Mas-

ACROSS THE RIVER AND OUT OF THE TREES 5

sey Report, published in 1951, was a landmark in the history of Canadian culture, not merely because it recommended a Canada Council, but because it signified the end of cultural laissez faire and assumed that the country itself had a responsibility for fostering its own culture. Back in 1930, Edgar was trying to organize voluntary societies for the relief of indigent authors, and there was an all too frequent assumption that society should concern itself with literature only when it felt like denouncing or censoring it. But the principle of social responsibility was established with the Massey Report, and without that principle Canadian literature would perhaps still be in its nonage. Federal support has been supplemented in the wealthier provinces, to the advantage of all concerned. In his book Odysseus Ever Returning George Woodcock quotes a review by Oscar Wilde in which Wilde praises an American writer for being concerned with the literature he loves rather than the country in which he lives, adding 'the Muses care so little for geography.' As usual, Wilde's critical instinct is sound: a writer cannot try to be anything except a writer, and a poet must adhere to literature, which is where his technical equipment comes from, not to the false rhetoric of the factitious and the voulu. But the last comment seems to me dead wrong. No Muse can function outside human space and time, that is, outside geography and history. Wilde himself owed his whole being as a writer to the tiny area of Anglo-Irish ascendancy which provided his own space and time. So while a Canadian writer may go anywhere and make any sort of statement about the place of Canada in his life, positive or negative, his formative environment and his ability as a writer will be interdependent, however different. What affects the writer's imagination, however, is an environment rather than a nation, and an environment is limited in range. I have often noted the fact that regionalism and literary maturity seem to grow together. In the days of expanding nations and empires culture followed the centralizing movements of politics and economics, and to centralize is to create a hierarchy. In Elizabethan England, for example, literary culture was a London culture, and a writer qua writer found it hard to write long outside London. One thinks of Herrick, a parson stuck in Devonshire, writing nostalgically of jewellery, perfume, women's clothes, and his happy times with the 'tribe of Ben.' This situation lasted until late in the eighteenth century. Wordsworth was the first major English writer to set up his headquarters outside London, and of course by Victorian times, with the rise of the great Midland cities, the cultural picture was quite different. The twentieth century showed a Hardy largely confined to 'Wessex,' a Dylan Thomas to south Wales, a Hugh MacDiarmid to Scotland, and so on. Similarly with American literature, which has always been strongly regionalist. Hence the increase in authority and precision in Canadian writing goes

6 NORTHROP FRYE

along with the sense of a clearly defined environment, in which one local area after another becomes culturally articulate through its authors. Just as we learn about American life inferentially, through what, say, Faulkner tells us about Mississippi or Frost about northern New England, so our knowledge of 'Canada' is inferred from what, for example, Jack Hodgins tells us about Vancouver Island or Robertson Davies about southwestern Ontario or Roger Lemelin about the pente douce in Quebec City. A writer working outside Canada, like Mavis Gallant, is evidence that Canadian literature is diversified enough to have its expatriates as well, as American literature had its Eliot and Gertrude Stein. So in a way it was an advantage for Canadian literature that Canada seems to have gone from a pre-national into a post-national phase without ever having been a nation. It very nearly became one in the Pearson period, when it took an active part in international politics, acquired a national flag, and was for a time a perceptible military and naval power. But it never shook off its role as an American satellite sufficiently to be taken very seriously as a distinctive political presence even then. As third-world nations began to emerge in Africa and Asia, Canada's much more low-keyed nationalism became increasingly faint, like a lute in a brass band. Two books with highly significant titles appeared at the beginning and end respectively of this period: A.R.M. Lower's Colony to Nation in 1946 and George Grant's Lament for a Nation in 1965. When Trudeau became prime minister in 1968 and adopted Marshall McLuhan as one of his advisers, Canada reverted to tribalism. French-Canadian literature is also of necessity regional, and achieved its maturity rather earlier, I think, than its English counterpart. The reasons for this are not hard to see. A poet or novelist writing in a beleaguered and culturally threatened language has no doubts about his social function, and a French-Canadian writer does not have his sense of identity so confused by the intrusive presence of an English-speaking American mass culture. The debates over the use of/owa/are, it seems to me, of immense benefit, whatever the attitude taken towards it, in sharpening the sense of what is going on in language and in the relation of oral to written French. I am also convinced, and have said elsewhere, that the discovery of a new French-Canadian identity through the Quiet Revolution was the crucial factor in consolidating a similar sense in English Canada. To document this statement fully, however, one would need to have a much more thorough knowledge of both literatures than most Canadians do, even though I am not speaking of direct literary influence. English and French Canada are still far too ignorant of each other's culture, and I think this fact indicates in itself that mutual translation is a more realistic handling of the problem than leaving it to 'biculturalism.' If culture is regional and environmental rather than national, the writer

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comes somewhere in between the maple tree, which pays no attention to the national boundary line, and the customs official, who is created by it. Cultural movements, I have suggested, tend to decentralize and regionalize, while political and economic ones tend to centralize and build up expanding empires. Hence one is not inconsistent if one sympathizes warmly with French-Canadian cultural aspirations and still opposes separatism, which is, in my view, a quite mistaken yoking of a progressive cultural movement to a regressive political one. But no sooner have we stated this principle than we realize how complex an issue is involved. The publishing and selling of books, for instance, is an economic operation as well as a cultural one, and many Canadian writers have felt from the beginning that their final accolade of success was a New York publisher. The United States being a highly protectionist country, in literature as elsewhere, this often meant that a fiction writer would have to alter his settings. The publishing careers of Ernest Thompson Seton, Martha Ostenso, and Stephen Leacock afford three instructively different ways of meeting this issue. But apart from that, the border often introduces an unreal casuistry about the real ambience of Canadian writers into the picture. More recently it has become the basis of a strident nationalist rhetoric which has very little content and no cultural significance. The word 'Canada' has a political meaning, but its cultural counterpart, which we also call 'Canada' for convenience, is the federation of Canadian communities, in all their rich variety from sea to sea. In an 'instant world' of communication there is no reason for cultural lag or for a difference between sophisticated writers in large centres and naive writers in smaller ones. A world like ours produces a single international style of which all existing literatures are regional developments. This international style is not a bag of rhetorical tricks, but a way of seeing and thinking in a world controlled by uniform patterns of technology, and the regional development is a way of escaping from that uniformity. If we read, say, Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock and then Robert Kroetsch's Badlands one after the other, we find that there is no similarity between them, and that one story is steeped in Guyana and the other in Alberta. But certain structural affinities, such as the fold-over in time, indicate that they are both products of much the same phase of cultural development. II

In 1930 native Canadian scholarship in the humanities was, as suggested above, spotty, and in a state of uneasy transition from nineteenth- to twentieth-century conceptions of humanism. Within the next twenty years a remarkable change had taken place. In 19501 had a year off on a Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Harvard, and on my first visit to the

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bookstores I was startled at the prominence in them of books by my colleagues at home. I knew about the books, naturally, but seeing them in that context was a different experience. There were Cochrane's great book on Christianity and classical culture, Barker Fairley's second book on Goethe, Kathleen Coburn's edition of Coleridge's Philosophical Lectures, F.E.L. Priestley's edition of Godwin's Political Justice, my own book on Blake, Woodhouse's edition of the Clark papers with its epochmaking introduction, Arthur Barker's book on Milton and Puritanism, still standard after nearly forty years - there were several others, but I remember seeing those. Not a bad showing, I thought, for Canadian scholarship with its very inadequate libraries and travel grants (I am speaking of 1950). There were other signs too, like the establishment of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies under Gilson, which indicated that Canadian scholarship in the humanities had become a genuine presence in the world. The scholarship had come to maturity rather earlier than the literature, and the fact nagged my subconscious for the next decade. The expansion of scholarly activity represented by the setting up of 'Letters in Canada' in the Quarterly meant that some scholarship, at least, was becoming assimilated to reviewing, even to journalism. And this kind of criticism has been traditionally regarded as a subordinate, even a parasitic activity. It was recognized that writers needed honest and informed criticism, but such criticism was the blest office of the epicene, of the bee who carries the pollen for the flower but does not fertilize it himself. I felt that when criticism and scholarship were the same activity (and an academic critic surely ought to apply the same principles to whatever he writes about) this parasitic relation to the writer disappeared. The academic critic is primarily concerned with the expansion of knowledge and sensitivity rather than with evaluation and 'maintaining standards,' which the writer must meet or else. He and the writer represent rather, I thought, the theory and practice respectively of the same activity. That did not mean, and could never possibly mean, that the critic's function was to influence the poet or tell him how he should write or what he should write about. But I felt that poetry and criticism, Dichtung and Wahrheit, imaginative expression and conceptual expression, were linked on equal terms in a dialectical relationship none the less, whenever they appeared in the same culture. It was clear that to follow up this conviction one would need to expand and redefine the conception of criticism. If I was right, what I said would be confirmed by the cultural developments taking place around me. Matthew Arnold, in his essay on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' and elsewhere, had spoken of the essential role of criticism in the maturing of a culture, from which the poet would directly benefit. But he also assumed that the critical faculty was 'lower' than the creative one,

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and I felt that this Romantic baggage of high and low metaphors was getting to be a nuisance. Some of my colleagues, notably A.S.P. Woodhouse, were absorbed by a scholarly interest to which they gave the name 'history of ideas.' It seemed to me that these 'ideas' were really elements or units in what Tillyard calls a world-picture, the conceptual aspect of a kind of cosmology of imagery and metaphor that every poet who works on a large scale seems to work with, and that seems to preserve its main outlines for centuries, however much it may alter in detail from one age to another. Earlier poets could take such a world-picture for granted, as something already formed by religious and political thought. In such passages as Ulysses' speech on degree in Troilus and Cressida we glimpse something of the framework of theoretical assumptions that Shakespeare depended on his audience's possessing. But these traditional frameworks had largely collapsed by the end of the eighteenth century, and new poetic structures would need new conceptual ones. Hence when Arnold spoke of 'criticism,' he meant partly what was traditionally meant by that word, but he was also speaking of something new, something just coming into being that had barely taken form in his day. Reviewing, of which I did a good deal in the fifties, is a hermeneutic activity, which means that it is a form of writing in which understanding and the articulating of that understanding become the same thing. It is also a species of translation: the poet writes in a specific language of symbolism, myth, imagery, and metaphor, and the reviewer renders that language in a different conceptual framework. Literature is one of the practical imaginative arts: criticism is one of the scholarly areas loosely called the humanities. It was clear that a great deal of shifting and regrouping of forces in the humanities was taking place. Toronto has always emphasized the importance of undergraduate teaching, and the undergraduate teaching of English literature is a very large activity, as it will be for the foreseeable future. But literary scholarship was beginning to resemble the well-known caterpillar, staring at a butterfly and saying 'you'll never catch me going up in one of those things.' As a student in the early thirties I had had to answer vague examination questions about a writer's 'style'; as a teacher in the early forties I had to learn something quite specific about stylistics and rhetorical devices. No colleague or student of Woodhouse could avoid the challenge of the fact that history and philosophy were not just Tjackground' for literature but were an essential part of literary criticism itself. Writers beyond the Toronto horizon at that time told me that anthropology and psychology were no less relevant. The question then arose, what was this larger body of criticism of which literary criticism, as traditionally practised, seemed to be forming a smaller and smaller part? It was evidently something like 'human science' of the kind adumbrated by Dilthey and others, but its total shape was still

1O NORTHROP FRYE

vague. The social scientists would have nothing to do with the suggestion that they were the applied humanities, nor did psychologists and anthropologists take much interest in the kind of use literary critics made of their material. I was aware of the rapid rise and influence of linguistics, especially synchronie linguistics, but, in striking contrast to the humane flexibility of nineteenth-century philology, linguistics was still a somewhat sectarian activity, not greatly interested even in literature, which it sometimes seemed almost to regard as a disease of language. But other movements were overriding this attitude, if I am right in thinking it existed. Gadamer, who is naturally thinking in a German context, says that the modern hermeneutic attitude, based on identifying intelligere and explicare, was established by the Romantic philosophers following Kant, and he adds that the effect of this was to move language from the periphery into the centre of the human sciences. It was not until the mid-sixties, with the rise of European structuralism and the conception of the 'linguistic model,' that I began to see something of the shape of what was emerging, and to see also where such figures as Wittgenstein and Heidegger belonged in the pattern. I am not sure how deeply Canadian criticism even yet has been affected by these developments: Dennis Lee's Savage Fields is an example of a critical approach that one hopes will soon be less exceptional. But I did learn three things of relevance to this question while writing about Canadian culture. One came from the editorial committee that had gathered under Carl Klinck to plan the Literary History of Canada. It was obvious to all of us from the start that a history of what would conventionally be called Canadian literature would be an utterly pointless cream-skimming operation. The book had to be an exhaustive survey of writing in Canada, whatever the subject written about, if the real 'literary' element in Canadian culture was to be captured. The second came from the fact that I was drawing support and suggestions and insights from such writers as George Grant, Abraham Rotstein, Carl Berger, Frank Underhill, who represented a great variety of academic 'disciplines,' but whose writing I could not think of as anything but Canadian 'criticism.' The third came from my personal knowledge of Canadian scholars, such as the authors of the books I saw at Harvard. I could not feel that their scholarship would have been exactly the same wherever they lived. I knew that my own interest in Blake had been sparked by the way he made imaginative sense out of the Nonconformist attitude that I had been brought up in myself. And whenever a Canadian scholar makes a personal statement, as, say, Kathleen Coburn does in her autobiography, In Pursuit of Coleridge, it becomes clear that scholarship, no less than poetry, grows out of a specific environment and is in part a response to it. It is no great credit to me that I entirely missed the significance, at the time, of the later work of Harold Innis, which appeared around 1950-2.1

ACROSS THE RIVER AND OUT OF THE TREES 11

found the prose style impenetrable and the subject-matter uncongenial. But, of course, as is widely recognized now, Innis was defining a central issue in the Canadian imagination which ultimately affected the interests of practically everyone concerned with words. Innis had first, as an economist, studied the fur trade and the fishing industry, and had gained from that study a vision of the 'Laurentian' centrifugal economic development of the country, with the traders and trappers fanning out from the Great Lakes into the far north. This in turn provided him with the underlying pattern of the primary modes of communication in Canada, the network of railways and canals mentioned above. After that, he asked himself the fateful question: 'OK, what happens next?' This took him into a panoramic vision of secondary communication through words, as conveyed by papyrus, paper, parchment, clay bricks, manuscripts, books, and newspapers. He saw that verbal communication was an essential instrument of power, and that an ascendant class will naturally try to control and monopolize it. In Empire and Communication, and in the more accessible essays in The Bias of Communication, he sketched the outlines of a philosophy of history, based on the theme of the production and the control of the means of communication, on a scale as comprehensive, at least potentially, as anything since Marx. Like Marx, too, he left a large mass of Grundrisse to be published after his death. Innis's influence, in Canada as elsewhere, will grow steadily, because with practice in reading him he becomes constantly more suggestive and rewarding. He was a curiously tentative writer, which may account for something of his rather spastic prose rhythm. He saw that every new form or technique generates both a positive impulse to exploit it and a negative impulse, especially strong in universities, to resist it, and that the former of course always outmanoeuvres the latter. But he had something of what I call the garrison mentality in him, the university being still his garrison for all the obscurantism in it that he comments on so dryly. Perhaps it is not possible to hold a vision of that scope and range steadily in one's mind without a more passionate commitment to society as well as to scholarship. Marshall McLuhan, a literary critic interested originally in Elizabethan rhetoric and its expression in both oral and written forms, followed up other issues connected with the technology of communication, some of them leads from Innis. His relation to the public was the opposite of Innis's: he was caught up in the manic-depressive roller-coaster of the news media, so that he was hysterically celebrated in the sixties and unreasonably neglected thereafter. It is likely that the theory of communications will be the aspect of the great critical pot-pourri of our time which will particularly interest Canadians, and to which they will make their most distinctive contribution. So it is perhaps time for a sympathetic rereading of The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media and a reab-

12 NORTHROP FRYE

sorption of McLuhan's influence, though no adequate treatment of this topic can be attempted here. I have often noted that many nineteenth-century writers in Canada, especially poets, spoke in what could be called, paraphrasing the title of Francis Sparshott's remarkable poem, the rhetoric of a divided voice. Up above was vigour and optimism and buoyancy and all the other qualities of life in a new land with lots of natural resources to exploit; underneath were lonely, bitter, brooding visions of cruelty without and despair within. This division in tone is still in Pratt, in a different way, and can even be traced in later writers, such as Layton, though the context naturally changes. It is by no means confined to Canada, as a reading of Whitman would soon show, but it is traditional here. McLuhan put a similar split rhetoric into an international context. On top was a breezy and self-assured butterslide theory of Western history, derived probably from a Chestertonian religious orientation, according to which medieval culture had preserved a balanced way of life that employed all the senses, depended on personal contact, and lived with 'tribal/ or small community units. Since then we have skittered down a slope into increasing specialization (McLuhan defines the specialist as the man who never makes a minor mistake on his way to a major fallacy), a self-hypnotism from concentrating on the visual stimuli of print and mathematics, a dividing and subdividing of life into separate 'problems,' and an obsession with linear advance also fostered by print and numbers. The electronic media, properly understood and manipulated, could reverse the direction of all this. Below was a horrifying vision of a global village, at once completely centralized and completely decentralized, with all its senses assailed at once, in a state of terror and anxiety at once stagnant and chaotic, equally a tyranny and an anarchy. His phrase 'defence against media fallout' indicated this direction in his thought. In the sixties both the anti-intellectuals, who wanted to hear that they had only to disregard books and watch television to get with it, and the 'activists/ pursuing terror for its own sake, found much to misunderstand in McLuhan. Many of his theses involved research in linguistics, anthropology, sensory psychology, and economics which has still to be done or established even in those fields, and his recurring tendency to determinism involved him in prophecies not borne out by events. Media may be hot or cool, but societies do not turn hot or cool in consequence of adopting them. Canada is a cool country with cool people in it, hence all its media are cool. But McLuhan raised questions that are deeply involved in any survey of contemporary culture, and in any attempt to define the boundaries of the emerging theory of society that I call 'criticism' in its larger context. Meanwhile Canada's own involvement with new media, more particularly film and radio, had been a decisive influence in maturing the culture

ACROSS THE RIVER AND OUT OF THE TREES 13

of the country and giving it a place in the international scene. I have no space or expertise to tell the story of the golden age of the NFB and CBC radio in the forties and early fifties. That has been done before, and it is generally recognized that film and radio are the media of much of the best work produced in Canadian culture. The benefits extended into literature, through radio plays and such programmes as Anthology, and Andrew Allan and Robert Weaver are names of the same kind of significance in Canadian writing that publishers like Briggs had in the nineteenth century. Radio also influenced, I think, the development of a more orally based poetry, more closely related to recitation and a listening audience, and popular in a way that poetry had not been for many centuries. As I write this, an anthology of 'sound texts' comes in, poems based on sound and removed from ordinary syntax, and I notice that Canadian poets are deeply involved in this movement. But there were difficulties that the coming of television made painfully obvious. These three new media, film, radio and television, are mass media, and consequently follow the centrifugal and imperial rhythms of politics and economics more readily than the regionalizing rhythms of culture. This was not too crucial a problem for CBC radio, though it was certainly there, but the NFB had to struggle with problems of distribution created by the fact that movie houses had been monopolized by American syndicates. I remember a Spring Thaw skit which was a takeoff of an NFB film, ending with the line 'on view in your local Sunday-School basement.' So when television came, the government passed a Broadcasting Act and set up the CRTC as a regulating agency for both radio and television, and both private and subsidized networks. I became an advisory member of the CRTC in 1968, when the Broadcasting Act still made a good deal of sense. The feeling was that the distribution of books, newspapers, movies, and magazines had been very largely sold out to American interests, and that if television went the same way there would be no Canadian identity left. For the next decade what seemed like a completely autonomous technological development started to explode: microwave, cable, satellite, and now a metamorphosis of pay-TV. It was not autonomous, of course, but Canadian identity, in that area, began to look as desperate as a Spartan at Thermopylae. Nor could a regulating agency even count on the support of public opinion: when Canada was, in the stock phrase, 'flooded with American programmes,' it was clear that the majority of Canadians preferred the flood to any Canadian ark that would float above it. Further, television is expensive to produce, and there have been many complaints that not only the CBC but the educational stations set up by the wealthier provinces have become mired in real estate, bureaucracy, and vested interests. Many viewers living in or near Toronto say that they cling to the PBS station in Buffalo, looking for a standard of programming

14 NORTHROP FRYE

from it that they no longer expect from Canadian sources, and some of them, noting the frequent PBS appeals for money, draw the inference that limited funds may be a stimulus of livelier thinking. The provinces are demanding a larger share of control of communications, but their motives for doing so are not cultural ones. So a 'mass culture' which follows expanding economic rather than regionalizing rhythms complicates the situation I have been outlining very considerably. Certainly there is much in it at present which is not Canadian in any sense and expresses very little creative energy. On the other hand all the mass media seem to have an entire cultural history to recapitulate, from the most archaic crudity to the greatest technical, and eventually creative, sophistication. There are still bad movies and dull radio programs, just as there are still bad books, but a listener to FM radio today or a moviegoer is a long way from the world of Amos and Andy or the Keystone Cops. Television is more frustrating and is still largely formulaic, but it too seems to be maturing in obedience to an inner process of development. I think the inherent tendency of television, as of film and radio, is to decrease the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow listeners, and within its widening central area of appeal to find more room for a greater variety of tastes. In the sixties a resistance movement against the mass culture of (mainly) television grew up in the United States, and the magic word that explained everything that was then going on in this area was the word 'subculture.' But a subculture, whether its interest was in rock or drugs or meditation, showed a strong tendency to become mass news, featured on television networks or being reflected in fashion advertising. In other words these subcultures seemed to be really specialized forms of mass culture. Perhaps genuine culture is also the genuine form of subculture. No matter how complex the technical means of communication, the elements communicated are still words, tones, and images, the same elements that have been around since the earliest stone age. And I feel there is hope that the genuine article will continue, quietly but persistently and increasingly, to filter through the new technology. In this overview there are many subjects, such as painting, that cannot be touched on here, even though painting was perhaps the liveliest of all Canadian arts up to about 1960 at least, and is still very much in a foreground position. Other articles to follow will deal with the situation in detail, and will show the reader, I think, that Canada today is a far more exciting place to live in, culturally speaking, than its demoralized economy and demented political leadership would suggest. I do not know what the social causes of a culture are, or if there are any causes apart from conditioning factors, but half a century of contemplating its development, in Canada as elsewhere, has convinced me that it is the force that underlies both real social change and real social stability.

GUY ROCHER

Un demi-siècle d'évolution culturelle au Québec

INTRODUCTION

Lorsque j'étais un jeune professeur de sociologie, au début des années 50, nous recevions, mes collègues et moi, des invitations d'universités canadiennes pour aller expliquer pourquoi le Québec n'avait pas changé, s'attachait à son passé et demeurait comme figé au i8ême siècle. Depuis la fin des années 60, on nous invite à dire pourquoi le Québec a rapidement bougé, dans quel sens il évolue et ce qu'il risque de devenir à brève échéance ou à long terme. C'est là un indice assez mince, trop personnel peut-être, de la mutation qu'a connue le Québec au cours des dernières années. Mais il n'en est pas moins valable. Qui aurait quitté le Québec dans le années 30 et y reviendrait aujourd'hui, retrouverait une société profondément modifiée, ou du moins qui donne l'impression d'avoir connu de profondes modifications. Car il est possible qu'il y ait là une part d'illusions, nous y reviendrons plus loin. Mais le contact avec les personnes, les institutions, la littérature, le climat général du Québec, nous incite à croire à une évolution certaine. Les cinquante dernières années n'ont certainement pas été marquées au coin de la stabilité, de la continuité, de la permanence du statu quo. Et si l'on consulte les écrits récents des 'observateurs professionnels' de la société - politicologues, ethnologues, sociologues - l'image d'un Québec mouvant, mutant, changeant s'accentue encore davantage, devient presque une obsession, à tout le moins un lieu commun.1 Il ne faut pourtant pas croire qu'il n'y avait pas eu de changements avant les années 30. De grands brassages s'étaient produits à la fin du jgème siecieet au début du aoème. Mais ils affectaient surtout les structures et l'organisation sociale du Québec, sans atteindre beaucoup sa mentalité. C'est en effet à cette époque que se sont effectuées la révolution industrielle et l'urbanisation du Québec. De rural et artisanal qu'il était jusqu'au milieu du i9ème siècle, il s'est progressivement industrialisé et urbanisé, en se polarisant autour de certaines grandes agglomérations: tout d'abord Québec et Montréal, puis progressivement surtout Montréal. Le déclin de la ville de Québec comme second pôle industriel important est un événement majeur et malheureux du développement structural et culturel du Québec.

10 GUY ROCHER

Cependant, l'urbanisation et l'industrialisation de cette période ont été vécues par les Québécois francophones avec une mentalité pré-industrielle. C'est sans doute ce qui frappait les observateurs des années 30 et 40: le Québec ressemblait à un de ces lieux où les flots de deux grands cours d'eau se rencontrent sans se mêler encore. Des éléments de la société traditionnelle et de la société industrielle s'y côtoyaient sans s'interpénétrer. Tandis que dans le Québec rural, de grandes régions demeuraient toujours des enclaves bien protégées de société purement traditionnelle. Le Québec était industriel par son mode et ses rapports de production, sa division du travail, l'aménagement de son territoire, la concentration urbaine de sa population; il était pré-industriel par sa mentalité, son idéologie, sa morale, son ethos. A telle enseigne qu'on hésitait à dire du Québec qu'il était une société industrielle; c'était plutôt, selon le titre de l'ouvrage d'Everett C. Hughes à cette époque, une société 'in transition'.2 Cela s'explique pour une part parce que le Québécois francophone n'était pas responsable de l'industrialisation de son pays. Celle-ci se faisait sous les auspices de capitaux étrangers ou à tout le moins canadiens-anglais, et sous l'impulsion d'une main-d'œuvre qualifiée à laquelle les Canadiens français ne contribuaient qu'aux échelons inférieurs. Si ces derniers en retiraient quelque bénéfice, ce n'était pas à titre de partenaires ni d'actionnaires, mais d'employés subalternes. Cette situation apparaît sous une lumière crue lorsqu'on étudie, comme cela a été fait, la ligne de partage linguistique dans l'entreprise. Celle-ci se situait au niveau du contremaître dans la plus grande partie des entreprises importantes, jusque vers les années 50: le contremaître était généralement bilingue, pour pouvoir parler en français à ses employés et en anglais au personnel de bureau et au personnel supérieur de l'entreprise. Ce n'est que depuis quelques années que la ligne de partage linguistique a commencé de s'élever d'un échelon à l'autre pour les francophones, se situant maintenant à peu près au palier supérieur de l'entreprise ou au niveau du siège social.3 A l'intérieur de la société industrielle nord-américaine, le Québec francophone avait donc gardé l'allure d'une sorte de réserve culturelle homogène, caractérisée par la prédominance de l'Eglise catholique, l'alliance entre l'Etat et l'Eglise, un régime que l'on pouvait qualifier de cléricocratique qui valait en anglais au Québec le titre de 'priest-ridden province' - un système d'éducation encore marqué par l'influence du i8ème siècle, une morale directement inspirée de la religion catholique, un style de vie familiale que les sociologues taxaient de 'traditionnaliste.' Si l'on parle de la culture dans un sens plus strict, moins anthropologique, on peut dire que la production littéraire et artistique était fort inégale. A côté de certaines percées, remarquables précisément par leur isolement, de la part de quelques poètes (comme Emile Nelligan ou

UN DEMI-SIÈCLE D'ÉVOLUTION CULTURELLE 17

Saint-Denys Garneau) ou de peintres (comme Borduas), la plus grande part de la production littéraire et artistique s'inspirait d'une rhétorique et d'une esthétique qui n'appartenaient pas à notre siècle. C'est surtout cette culture, à la fois au sens anthropologique et au sens restreint du terme, qui a connu une évolution radicale et dramatique au cours des dernières décennies. Cela n'exclut pas que certains changements de structure se soient aussi produits durant la même période. Notons en particulier la baisse rapide autant qu'inattendue des naissances, entraînant un déclin de population sans précédent dans l'histoire du Québec; notons encore le rôle que s'est taillé l'Etat québécois, la progression de la bureaucratie publique, l'intervention sans cesse accrue du gouvernement dans des secteurs qui étaient jusque là réservés aux églises ou à l'initiative privée. Mais ces transformations structurelles étaient elles-mêmes le produit de l'évolution culturelle, de la mutation des mentalités, des changements dans l'esprit et dans l'âme du Québécois francophone.4 Je m'attacherai à décrire quelques-uns de ces profonds changements culturels du Québec contemporain, pour rechercher ensuite quelques facteurs d'explication. Nous terminerons par quelques jugements sur le présent et l'avenir. UNE CULTURE EN VOIE DE MODERNISATION

Caractérisons par quelques traits l'évolution récente de la culture québécoise. Le plus visible peut-être, celui qui saute aux yeux du premier observateur, c'est l'éclatement de la culture québécoise. On peut dire que celle-ci était, depuis bientôt deux cents ans, polarisée par deux communautés linguistiques et culturelles: la communauté française et la communauté anglaise. Il en fut ainsi à peu près jusqu'à la période de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. La communauté francophone était particulièrement homogène à la fois par sa religion, ses racines historiques, ses coutumes, sa mentalité, son style de vie. Moins unifiée, la communauté de langue anglaise avait quand même pris une forme distinctive, elle avait ses traditions, son leadership, son univers particulier qui la rendaient différente des autres communautés de langue anglaise du reste du Canada. Un double éclatement s'est produit. Tout d'abord, l'homogénéité de la communauté francophone s'est brisée. On n'y trouve plus l'unanimité religieuse d'autrefois. Il en est résulté que la diversité des règles morales de conduite privée a remplacé l'ancienne unité. La tradition et le passé ont perdu leur position privilégiée. Et dans le secteur économique, de nouvelles professions se sont multipliées, les associations de groupes d'intérêts se sont diversifiées. Dans l'ensemble de la société, de nouvelles élites sont apparues, pour jouer le rôle de porte-parole de nouvelles

l8 GUY ROCHER

formations sociales.5 'Feu l'unanimité/ telle était la constatation que faisait Gérard Pelletier dans un article retentissant de la revue Cité libre à la fin des années 50. En second lieu, la communauté anglophone s'est, de son côté, diversifiée elle aussi, moins de l'intérieur que par l'apport de nouveaux éléments. C'est à son profit que l'immigration a surtout joué depuis trente ans. A la communauté anglophone de vieille souche se sont ajoutés des allophones originaires de Grèce, d'Italie, d'Allemagne, et même de pays ou de régions de tradition latine comme l'Espagne, le Portugal, l'Amérique du Sud. Car les immigrants - surtout ceux qui sont venus au Québec depuis la Deuxième Guerre mondiale - ont, dans leur immense majorité, grossi la communauté anglophone: c'est la langue anglaise qu'ils ont adoptée et c'est aux écoles de langue anglaise, protestantes et catholiques, qu'ils ont envoyé leurs enfants.6 C'est d'ailleurs là que réside une des causes les plus puissantes du néo-nationalisme québécois, de l'idéologie séparatiste ou souverainiste et de la récente législation sur la langue (Loi 101). Mais il ne s'est pas produit une véritable 'assimilation' de ces allophones par la communauté anglophone originelle de source brittanique: les allophones ont adopté la langue anglaise et des éléments de la culture anglophone sans être pleinement accueillis par la communauté anglophone originelle et intégrés à elle. Il en résulte que ce qu'on a l'habitude d'appeler la 'communauté anglophone' du Québec est devenu une réalité très complexe, faite d'éléments disparates, d'origines et de cultures très diverses. Le Québec est donc devenu un pays multiple au point de vue culturel. Les conflits de valeur et les conflits d'identité y sont vécus d'une manière de plus en plus vive. Et il faut maintenant savoir que c'est là une réalité nouvelle avec laquelle le Québec devra apprendre à exister.7 Un second trait, qui n'est pas sans lien avec le premier, c'est celui de la laïcisation récente que l'on peut facilement observer dans la mentalité québécoise. Surtout au sein de la communauté francophone. Si l'Eglise catholique s'est retirée du pouvoir politique, si elle s'est repliée sur elle-même, abandonnant à l'Etat les nombreuses fonctions qu'elle exerçait dans l'enseignement, la santé et l'assistance sociale, c'est qu'elle ne trouve plus qu'un appui et un support limités dans la population québécoise. Ce n'est plus à elle que les Québécois font d'abord appel, ce n'est plus vers elle qu'ils se tournent, ce n'est plus d'elle qu'ils attendent services et directives. Le recrutement du clergé s'est presque tari, tant du côté des femmes que des hommes, de sorte que les communautés religieuses et le clergé n'ont plus été en mesure de remplir les fonctions qu'ils exerçaient antérieurement. Pour un nombre croissant de Québécois, une dissociation plus grande qu'auparavant s'est opérée entre la religion et la morale, cette dernière n'obéissant plus nécessairement aux impératifs de la première. Même des couples demeurés attachés à l'Eglise

UN DEMI-SIÈCLE D'ÉVOLUTION CULTURELLE 19

catholique et fréquentant assidûment les sacrements recourent aux moyens anticonceptionnels pour contrôler et planifier les naissances, sans y voir de contradiction avec leur allégeance religieuse. Un autre trait important du Québec contemporain: une beaucoup plus grande ouverture au monde qu'autrefois. Les Québécois, francophones autant qu'anglophones, ont toujours été de grands voyageurs. Autrefois, un certain nombre d'entre eux furent coureurs des bois, explorateurs, navigateurs au long cours, etc. Puis, dans presque toutes les familles québécoises, il y eut des hommes et des femmes missionnaires, en Chine, en Afrique, en Amérique du Sud, dans le Grand Nord canadien. Les récits des missionnaires constituaient, dans la prédication dominicale, une sorte de folklore vivant, toujours renouvelé, d'histoires exotiques. Aujourd'hui, les Québécois voyagent eux-mêmes et pour leur propre compte. Tous les jeunes Québécois, ou presque, ont visité une partie du monde, beaucoup ont séjourné pendant des périodes assez longues dans divers pays d'Afrique, d'Asie, d'Amérique du Sud tout autant que d'Europe ou qu'aux Etats-Unis. Bien sûr, les expériences vécues à l'étranger ont été plus ou moins superficielles, selon les cas, et leur influence sur le reste de la vie plus ou moins profonde. Mais pour la très grande majorité des jeunes Québécois, le Québec n'est plus le centre du monde, il n'est plus l'unique mesure des choses; ils ont connu ailleurs des chocs culturels dont ils resteront à jamais marqués. Et cela est aussi vrai, toute proportion gardée, d'un grand nombre d'adultes. La manie ou la mode du voyage n'est pas le propre d'un certain âge. Le Québécois adulte et même âgé aime voyager, voir le monde, prendre contact avec d'autres paysages, d'autres gens, d'autres cultures. Il voyage souvent mal, parce qu'il est peu préparé et qu'il est facilement victime du ghetto dont on sait entourer les touristes, mais ce n'est pas nécessairement mauvaise volonté de sa part. Finalement, dernier trait qui mérite d'être souligné: la diversification et la multiplication des voies de recherche chez les créateurs, artistes, écrivains, poètes, chansonniers francophones québécois. Compte tenu du retard accumulé, le Québec est en train de se tailler, surtout dans le monde francophone, une place de plus en plus remarquée pour sa poésie, ses romans, son théâtre, sa musique. Sans exagérer la qualité des œuvres littéraires et artistiques qu'il produit, on peut au moins affirmer qu'il connaît une période de renaissance, qu'il est en train de faire sa rentrée dans le monde contemporain de la littérature et des arts. Un mot résume peut-être cette évolution culturelle des dernières années: celui de modernisation. C'est un terme équivoque, que les sociologues ont suremployé pendant un certain temps et qu'ils hésitent maintenant à reprendre. On n'aime pas la connotation plus ou moins évolutionniste qu'il semble comporter. Il n'en reste pas moins que, si l'on exclut tout jugement de valeur sur ce que cette modernisation comporte de bon

20 GUY ROCHER

et de mauvais, d'heureux et de néfaste, de solide et de pacotille, on peut en retenir l'idée du saut dans le 2oème siècle que fait une société. C'est ce qui est arrivé au Québec, plus particulièrement à sa communauté francophone. QUELQUES FACTEURS EXPLICATIFS

II est très probable que l'écart qui subsistait et qui grandissait entre une société de type industriel et la mentalité pré-industrielle devenait de plus en plus insupportable. Déjà dans les années 40, on pouvait prévoir que cet écart allait éclater et que le Québec n'allait pas pouvoir vivre longtemps encore dans des structures économiques de nature industrielle avec une mentalité pré-industrielle. Il y avait une sorte de schizophrénie à vivre ainsi à l'intérieure d'un univers mental dissocié de la réalité quotidienne. La Deuxième Guerre mondiale a puissamment contribué à cette évolution. Ce n'est pas sans raison que les historiens datent les grandes périodes historiques de certaines guerres. Celles-ci ont exercé, à travers toute l'Histoire, une influence considérable sur la vie des peuples, les mentalités, les croyances, les idéologies. Le Québec n'a pas été à l'abri de l'immense brassage de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Beaucoup de femmes sont allées travailler dans les 'usines de guerre,' pendant qu'un grand nombre de jeunes hommes vivaient des expériences inattendues pour eux dans l'armée et en campagne militaire. Au sortir d'une période aussi troublée, le Québec ne pouvait plus jamais être le même qu'auparavant. C'est peut-être en particulier à ces événements que se rattache l'ouverture au monde extérieur dont on parlait plus haut. Un autre facteur s'ajoute encore: la révolution scolaire opérée durant cette période. Il ne faut cependant pas croire que celle-ci ne date que des récentes années. Au cours des années 30, il y eut un vaste débat, qui, je crois, annonçait l'avenir, autour de l'introduction d'un enseignement des sciences dans le cours classique traditionnel. Celui-ci avait été axé surtout sur les lettres et la philosophie, négligeant les mathématiques et les sciences exactes. Il demeurait fidèle à l'univers intellectuel du classicisme. Ou du moins c'est ainsi qu'il interprétait ce qu'il était devenu. Au cours des années 40, les tenants de l'enseignement des sciences avaient triomphé. Le cours classique en fut profondément modifié.8 C'est cependant au cours des années 50 et plus encore des années 60 qu'une réforme majeure fut entreprise. Celle des années 30 n'avait touché que l'enseignement classique; celle des années 60 allait transformer l'ensemble du système. Tout en continuant à se distinguer l'un de l'autre, le secteur protestant et le secteur catholique furent unifiés sous une même autorité, des normes identiques, une même réglementation. Mais c'est surtout le secteur catholique qui a connu de profondes mutations, à la fois dans ses structures, ses programmes, sa mentalité. Cette

UN DEMI-SIÈCLE D'ÉVOLUTION CULTURELLE 21

transformation a été caractérisée notamment par l'abandon du cours classique en tant que tel et l'unification de l'ensemble du système, composé jusque là de parties plus ou moins indépendantes les unes des autres, par la démocratisation de l'accès à l'enseignement secondaire, collégial et supérieur, par la refonte des programmes dans une perspective de polyvalence et par la revalorisation de l'enseignement public, qui avait été négligé depuis longtemps au profit de l'enseignement privé. Pour ceux qui ont étudié dans le système scolaire québécois il y a trente ou quarante ans, celui d'aujourd'hui est méconnaissable. C'est ce qui cause très souvent perplexité et angoisse aux parents qui ne se sentent plus en mesure de suivre leur enfant dans un circuit scolaire qui n'a presque plus rien de commun avec celui qu'ils ont connu.9 Reflet de l'évolution culturelle en cours? Agent de cette transformation? La révolution scolaire, surtout celle des années 60, fut très probablement les deux à la fois. Elle fut l'indice d'une nouvelle mentalité, tout autant qu'elle fut portée par cette nouvelle mentalité et qu'elle contribua à en accentuer les caractères nouveaux. Finalement, cette évolution du Québec ne s'explique probablement pas sans qu'on se réfère aux changements de mentalité qui se sont opérés dans l'ensemble de l'Occident contemporain. Il est possible que, pour des raisons non encore analysées, le Québec, et surtout la communauté francophone québécoise, ait été plus sensible que d'autres sociétés aux grandes transformations culturelles qu'a connues l'Occident au cours des dernières décennies. En tout cas, des secteurs de la société québécoise ont accueilli avec enthousiasme l'innovation culturelle, que ce soit dans les mœurs, la production artistique ou littéraire, les idéologies politiques aussi bien que la contre-culture. C'est ce que l'on peut observer, par exemple, tant chez les jeunes poètes que dans les mouvements féministes, dans la formation de certaines 'communes' que dans divers mouvements religieux. PROGRÈS OU RECUL?

Devant cette évolution, on peut se demander si les conditions nouvelles qui prédominent au Québec sont plus favorables qu'elles ne l'étaient autrefois, ou moins, au développement culturel à la fois des personnes, des groupes et de l'ensemble de la société. Les changements que nous venons d'évoquer sont-ils de malheureuses perturbations qui ont saccagé un univers jusque là bien ordonné et relativement fonctionnel? Ou s'agitil d'un renouvellement culturel et spirituel susceptible de porter bientôt de beaux et bons fruits? On devine qu'il n'est pas aisé de répondre à de telles questions. Il faut sans doute distinguer, à la manière des philosophes et théologiens du Moyen Age. Tout d'abord, il est certain que le Québec connaît depuis quelques

22 GUY ROCHER

années un renouveau de conscience politique. Se détachant de l'Eglise catholique, les Québécois se sont tournés vers le pouvoir politique, lui demandant de remplir des rôles et de prendre des responsabilités qu'on lui avait jusque là refusés. En même temps, la question de l'identité nationale, vieux problème latent dans la conscience canadienne-française depuis plus de 150 ans, a connu une résurgence qui s'est exprimée de différentes manières: néo-nationalisme québécois, cellules révolutionnaires du FLQ et d'autres mouvements secrets, périodes de terrorisme et de violence, poussée du Parti québécois. Je sais bien que dans les milieux canadiens-anglais, on a plutôt tendance à interpréter tous ces phénomènes d'une manière plus négative que positive. Pourtant, toute cette effervescence de pensée et de critique politique a constitué un bain très favorable au développement culturel du Québec. Pour beaucoup d'artistes, ce fut une source d'inspiration importante, dont on a pu voir la traduction dans des romans, des poèmes, des pièces de théâtre, des chansons. Il n'y a pas souvent de très grands moments nationalistes dans la vie d'un peuple, d'une nation: ils s'accompagnent à la fois d'un débordement d'activités plus ou moins sauvages et d'un certain romantisme dont les racines touchent à l'humain le plus profond. C'est dans la même lignée que se situe la récente législation sur la langue au Québec, la Loi 101. Elle aussi souffre d'une mauvaise réputation dans les milieux anglophones canadiens; on a voulu en donner l'image d'une législation répressive et même tyrannique. La presse anglophone canadienne, celle du Québec surtout, mais celle aussi des autres provinces, s'est particulièrement déchaînée contre cette loi. On a trop facilement oublié de la considérer comme un important geste d'affirmation de soi de la communauté francophone québécoise. Il n'y a pas que des raisons économiques qui ont dicté au gouvernement du Québec cette Charte, dont l'objectif évident était de rétablir un certain équilibre du pouvoir des communautés linguistiques québécoises dans le monde du travail et de l'économie; il y avait également la poussée d'une idéologie nationaliste qui trouve appui dans la fierté de la langue, de sa pureté, de sa qualité, tout autant que de l'usage que l'on en fait. Cette loi a voulu exprimer le respect retrouvé pour la langue française, à la fois comme véhicule d'expression de la pensée et comme symbole d'identité culturelle. On comprend alors que la caricature que l'on en a trop souvent faite dans la communauté anglophone canadienne était particulièrement irritante pour bien des francophones du Québec. L'incompréhension de l'évolution actuelle du Québec contemporain apparaissait là d'une manière trop évidente et même choquante. Il est facile de constater que les relations entre la communauté francophone québécoise et les autres communautés linguistiques du Québec ne se sont pas améliorées. On peut même dire qu'elles sont plus tendues qu'elles n'ont jamais été.10 Les 'deux solitudes/ qu'a symboliquement

UN DEMI-SIÈCLE D'ÉVOLUTION CULTURELLE 23

décrites Hugh MacLennan dans son roman, subsistent toujours; on pourrait affirmer qu'elles ont été remplacées par plusieurs solitudes, avec la multiplication des nouvelles communautés ethniques (grecque, italienne, portugaise, espagnole, etc). Il continue à y avoir très peu d'échanges culturels entre les francophones, les anglophones, les allophones du Québec. Les uns ignorent ce que font les autres, quand encore ne règne pas entre eux un climat de méfiance et de malentendus. C'est probablement du côté anglophone que le plus de progrès s'est cependant fait sentir à cet égard. Un nombre croissant d'anglophones québécois ont fait de grands efforts pour mieux connaître la langue et la culture de leurs compatriotes francophones, probablement à l'occasion du réveil politique et culturel qui se produisait chez ces derniers. Pour leur part, les francophones sont encore centrés sur eux-mêmes, trop occupés de leur renouveau culturel et politique pour avoir le temps et les disponibilités nécessaires pour voir et comprendre les autres groupes culturels du Québec. Les grandes possibilités d'enrichissement réciproque caractéristiques d'une situation de cohabitation comme celle que nous connaissons au Québec n'ont pas encore trouvé de preneurs. Et pour l'heure, il est probable que le climat politique demeure un facteur négatif, de sorte que l'on ne peut encore s'attendre à un rapide revirement de cette situation. Par ailleurs, les deux communautés ont ceci en commun qu'elles sont profondément marquées toutes les deux par l'influence américaine, et cela d'une manière croissante. On s'imagine trop aisément que la communauté francophone est protégée par sa langue des influences américaines. Il s'agit, bien sûr, d'une certaine barrière, mais qui est bien insuffisante, étant donné la puissante pression que représente la civilisation américaine à nos portes. D'ailleurs, c'est à travers le monde entier que l'influence de cette civilisation se fait sentir, bien au-delà des limites géographiques et des barrières de langues. Pour le Québec francophone autant qu'anglophone, tout comme pour l'ensemble du Canada, la proximité du colosse américain constitue sûrement le plus grand défi de l'avenir. Saurons-nous développer une culture qui nous soit propre, qui ait son originalité, qui ne soit pas une simple copie ou une annexe de la culture étatsunienne? Personnellement, je crois qu'il est purement utopique de penser que la culture canadienne autant que québécoise puisse être totalement et entièrement indépendante de la culture américaine. Qui le pense, d'ailleurs? Mais je crois aussi qu'il est possible pour une collectivité comme la nôtre de ne pas subir passivement cette influence, mais plutôt d'assimiler la culture étatsunienne, de l'intégrer à notre passé, à l'acquis déjà constitué et d'en faire un nouveau produit ayant une certaine originalité. Il faudra pour cela savoir communiquer avec les milieux intellectuels les plus vivants aux Etats-Unis, ceux qui nourrissent une contestation interne de la civilisation étatsunienne, ce que nous faisons bien peu au Canada, encore moins au

24 GUY ROCHER

Québec. L'influence américaine entre à flots dans nos maisons et dans nos vies, surtout par la voie des mass media et par les habitudes de consommation que nous partageons avec nos voisins du sud11. Mais nous n'avons pas encore su aller chercher aux Etats-Unis ce qu'il y a d'intellectuellement et de spirituellement animé, de non conformiste, de contestataire de l'ordre trop bien établi. Au Québec, les mouvements de contestation, qu'ils soient chez les jeunes, dans la gauche ou à l'intérieur de l'Eglise catholique, n'ont étrangement à peu près aucun contact avec leurs homologues étatsuniens. Ils croient préférable de s'inspirer des mouvements européens, qu'ils soient français, allemands, ou britanniques. Pourtant, c'est avec les mouvements américains bien plus qu'avec les mouvements européens que ceux d'ici ont en commun. C'est là un étrange paradoxe. Et si nous ne résolvons pas cette ambiguïté, je crois que nous ne pourrons jamais assimiler la culture américaine (au sens fort du terme, c'est-à-dire la faire nôtre en nous l'appropriant et en la transformant en notre substance), nous ne ferons que la subir et en être finalement les victimes. Il y a par ailleurs un phénomène encourageant que l'on peut observer au Québec depuis quelques années: c'est un certain déplacement de la dynamique du développement culturel vers les régions autres que Montréal et Québec. Un éveil s'est produit en faveur du développement régional, d'abord économique puis de plus en plus culturel. Par exemple, on s'insurge contre le fait que la radio et la télévision ne charrient que des émissions trop souvent exclusivement montréalaises et que l'ensemble de la programmation soit trop marqué par l'influence de Montréal. On assiste à un début de prise en charge du développement culturel des régions par des petits groupes, plus ou moins militants. Cela se produit, par exemple, autour de la radio et la télévision communautaires, de Radio-Québec, d'une certaine presse régionale, des institutions scolaires locales et régionales.12 Reconnaissons-le, il y a ici beaucoup plus d'aspirations frustrées que de gratifications. Les régions, surtout celles qui sont périphériques, n'ont encore que des ressources financières et surtout humaines limitées pour prendre en charge et soutenir des institutions culturelles de bonne qualité. De plus, une trop longue habitude de passivité rend plus difficile et parfois problématique la participation de la population à de nouvelles entreprises régionales, souvent audacieuses, parfois même suicidaires. C'est évidemment toujours une minorité, et toujours la même, qui se retrouve dans toutes les activités de participation à l'intérieur d'une région. Il y a donc souvent insatisfaction à la fois chez la clientèle, qui n'est pas encore prête à bénéficier d'une entreprise régionale, et chez les porteurs de l'idéologie régionaliste et de participation. Malgré ces difficultés et les limites de ce développement culturel, je crois personnellement qu'on peut y voir une raison d'espoir pour l'ave-

UN DEMI-SIÈCLE D'ÉVOLUTION CULTURELLE 25

nir. Les régions autres que Montréal et Québec recèlent des richesses culturelles enracinées dans le passé et qui s'y sont conservées d'une manière plus authentique que dans les métropoles. Il y a là une des sources d'un développement culturel original, dont on pourrait tirer profit dans l'élaboration d'une culture nord-américaine non étatsunienne. Terminons en revenant sur une remarque que nous faisions au début de cet article: n'a-t-on pas eu tendance à exagérer les changements réels qu'a connus le Québec au cours des deux dernières décennies? Il fut un temps, surtout au cours des années 60, où l'on édifia le changement en idéologie. L'évolution était bien, le statu quo était mal; la vertu résidait dans la mutation, l'arrêt était nécessairement stagnation. L'effet en a été qu'on a voulu voir du changement partout, et qu'on en a probablement vu plus qu'il n'y en avait. On assiste en ce moment, au Québec comme presque partout dans le monde, à un retour à des positions conservatrices plus rassurantes, plus ordonnées, apparemment plus sages. Les changements engagés dans les années 50 et 60 connaissent un coup de frein. D'importants secteurs de la population, même de la jeunesse, remettent en question les transformations apportées, par exemple dans le système scolaire ou dans l'intervention de l'Etat en matière culturelle, et souhaitent un étrange retour en arrière. Cette situation nouvelle, plutôt inattendue, force à regarder le chemin parcouru, à se demander ce qui a vraiment changé et si l'on n'a pas eu plus peur de voir changer les choses qu'on en a vraiment fait changer. Ces doutes, portant à la fois sur l'étendue des changements accomplis et sur leur opportunité, créent un climat de perplexité qui n'est guère favorable à une vie et à une activité culturelles intenses. C'est plutôt une atmosphère d'inhibition, de gêne, de timidité que l'on respire, peu propice à l'innovation, à l'inventivité, à l'imaginaire. Après avoir été marquée par l'esprit de la 'nouvelle vague' des jeunes dans les années 60, notre époque vient d'entrer dans une phase que semble dominer l'esprit du 'troisième âge.' Si l'on en croit la démographie, et si on lui attribue une certaine importance, il faudra attendre plusieurs années avant de déboucher sur des temps plus lumineux! CONCLUSION Doit-on conclure sur cette note pessimiste ou peut-on revenir à quelques mots d'optimisme? Il me semble qu'un mélange des deux nous habite présentement. Des conditions favorables et d'autres défavorables au développement culturel du Québec se côtoient, rendant difficile l'analyse de la situation présente, et incertaine la prévision de l'avenir. Mais c'est peut-être précisément dans cette tension des incertitudes,

20 GUY ROCHER

des débats, des conflits de valeurs, du flux et du reflux des idéologies du passé et de celles de l'avenir que peut se nourrir un nouveau développement culturel. Les grandes périodes de création culturelle n'ont pas été toutes associées à des époques de paix, de calme, d'euphorie collective et de confiance en l'avenir, loin de là! Il faut seulement s'assurer que les forces inhibitrices de l'esprit libre et créateur ne seront pas assez dominantes pour étouffer les motivations et les inclinations positives. Comment y réussir? La seule volonté des personnes et des groupes n'y suffit pas. Elle se mêle aux accidents de l'histoire, aux jeux du hasard, aux impondérables des grandes tendances historiques. Devant l'Histoire en marche et qu'il tente de faire, l'individu ne se sent maître que de quelques manettes; l'immense tableau de bord où se lit l'avenir ne lui apparaît que d'une manière bien partielle, incomplète et souvent faussée. Mais c'est quand même avec le désir et le vouloir de réaliser quelque chose, malgré la tourmente des temps où l'on vit, que chacun reste accroché aux commandes. NOTES 1 La liste des ouvrages à rappeler ici pourrait être longue, car on a beaucoup écrit sur le Québec depuis quelques années. Mentionnons-en quelques uns, tout en soulignant que cette enumeration est loin d'être exhaustive. L'ordre chronologique veut que les premiers sont de langue anglaise: Hugh Bingham Myers (sous la direction de), The Quebec Revolution (Montréal: Harvest House 1964); Ramsay Cook, Canada and the French-Canadian Question (Toronto: Macmillan 1966); Edward M. Corbet, Quebec Confronts Canada (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1967); Marcel Rioux, La Question du Québec (Paris: Seghers 1969); Fernand Dumont, La Vigile du Québec (Montréal: Hurtubise HMH 171); Marcel Rioux et Yves Martin (sous la direction de), La Société canadiennefrançaise (Montréal: Hurtubise HMH 1971; publié d'abord en anglais: French Canadian Society [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1964]); Jean-Luc Migué (sous la direction de), Le Québec d'aujourd'hui. Regards d'universitaires (Montréal: Hurtubise HMH 1971); Claude Ryan (sous la direction de), Le Québec qui se fait (Montréal: Hurtubise HMH 1971); Guy Rocher, Le Québec en mutation (Montréal: Hurtubise HMH 1973); Gabriel Gagnon et Luc Martin (sous la direction de), Québec 1960-1980. La crise du développement (Montréal: Hurtubise HMH 1973); Marcel Rioux, Les Québécois (Paris: Seuil 1974); Denis Monière, Le Développement des idéologies au Québec, des origines à nos jours (Montréal: Québec/ Amérique 1977); Edouard Cloutier et Daniel Latouche (sous la direction de), Le Système politique québécois (Montréal: Hurtubise HMH 1979). 2 Everett C. Hughes, French Canada in Transition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1941). Sur l'histoire de l'industrialisation québécoise, voir aussi, par exemple, l'article d'Albert Faucher, 'Le Caractère continental de l'industrialisation au Québec,' Recherches sociographiques, 6:3 (1965), 219-36.

UN DEMI-SIÈCLE D'ÉVOLUTION CULTURELLE 27

3 L'étude d'Everett C. Hughes est très révélatrice de la situation dans les années 30. Le clivage au début des années 70 est bien décrit par Serge Carlos, L'Utilisation du français dans le monde du travail au Québec, Etude £3, réalisée pour le compte de la Commission d'enquête sur la situation de la langue française et sur les droits linguistiques au Québec (Québec: juillet 1973). 4 II faut lire les deux articles de Gary Caldwell et B. Dan Czarnocki, 'Un rattrapage raté. Le Changement social dans le Québec d'après-guerre, 19501974: Une comparaison Québec/Ontario/ Recherches sociographiques, 18:1 (1977), 9-58; et 'Un rattrapage raté n. La Variation à court terme/ Recherches sociographiques, 18:3 (1977), 366-96. Les deux auteurs évoquent en particulier ce qu'ils appellent le modèle 'disjonctif ' que j'ai proposé pour l'analyse de l'évolution du Québec depuis la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Ils me reprochent cependant d'avoir minimisé les changements de structure qui se sont opérés durant cette période, au profit des mutations de la culture. Il y a là une question d'accent: sans nier certains changements structurais, je crois que ceux-ci ont été enveloppés et même portés par les grandes transformations culturelles que le Québec a traversées au cours des trois dernières décennies. 5 Guy Rocher, 'Multiplication des élites et changement social au Canada français,' Revue de l'Institut de sociologie, i (1968), 79-94. 6 Voir, par exemple, de Richard J. Joy, Languages in Conflict (Ottawa: publié par l'auteur 1967), en particulier le chapitre 9, 'Immigration: 95% Englishspeaking.' 7 Cette évolution et la situation présente ont été bien décrites et analysées dans le Livre blanc du Gouvernement du Québec, La Politique québécoise du développement culturel (Québec: Editeur officiel 1978), tome i, chapitre 3. 8 Nicole Gagnon, 'L'Idéologie humaniste dans la revue L'Enseignement secondaire,' Recherches sociographiques, 4:2 (1963), 167-200; reproduit dans Ecole et société au Québec, sous la direction de Pierre W. Bélanger et Guy Rocher, 2e éd (Montréal: Hurtubise HMH 1975), i, 59-89. 9 Sur cette réforme, il y a eu beaucoup d'écrits. On peut consulter notamment le Rapport de la Commission d'Enquête sur l'enseignement au Québec (Québec 19636), 5 tomes. Et une certaine mise en perspective de cette réforme dans Le Rapport Parent, dix ans après (Montréal: Bellarmin 1975) et de nombreux articles dans les divers numéros de la revue Prospectives. 10 Rainer Knopff, 'Language and Culture in the Canadian Debate: The Battle of the White Papers,' Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism/Revue canadienne des études sur le nationalisme, 6:1 (1979), 66-82. L'auteur y analyse certaines ambiguïtés des politiques linguistiques du gouvernement Lévesque et du gouvernement Trudeau. Mais il demeure lui aussi assez ambigu. Ce qui montre bien la grande difficulté du sujet. Et il semble bien que le Parti libéral du Québec, sous la direction de Claude Ryan, ne soit pas près de dissiper ces mêmes ambiguïtés. 11 Gilbert Maistre, 'L'Influence de la radio et de la télévision américaines au Canada,' Recherches sociographiques, 12:1 (1971), 51-75.

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12 A cet égard, la loi de Radio-Québec, telle que récemment amendée, constitue un pas en avant très important. Elle met en place des comités régionaux ayant de véritables responsabilités pour la programmation et la production d'émissions; en même temps, elle modifie le conseil d'administration en le constituant pour moitié des présidents des comités régionaux. Il y a donc des chances que Radio-Québec devienne d'ici deux ou trois ans un organisme de télévision publique dont une partie de la programmation sera conçue et réalisée en région. Ce sera là l'aboutissement d'une longue évolution, tant dans les régions qu'au bureau central de Radio-Québec et au gouvernement du Québec.

HUGH MACLENNAN

Fiction in Canada - 1930 to 1980

i

I have been asked to write about Canadian fiction in English between 1930 and 1980, with particular emphasis on the opportunities open to our novelists today in comparison to the past. Canada was still an innocent country when I began to write. If she is not so any more, it is because she has at last become a full-fledged member of twentieth-century society. That this has been an appalling century can hardly be disputed by anyone capable of thought. I remember an eminent English thinker, some thirty years ago, commiserating with a large Canadian audience on our misfortune to have come of age in such a time. I am far from being alone in believing that the only man who could truly understand the essence of our century was Jonathan Swift, with his insight that reason combined with applied science, built into a Yahoo, would be more horrifying in its results than ignorant brutality. Nevertheless, our nation is still worthy of love. She has not sold her soul outright to the men of greed and power. She still has a conscience and this may be why she finds it so difficult to make up her mind even about herself. But at least we all know that Canada can no longer rely on others to solve her problems for her. Perhaps this is the final meaning of a loss of innocence. When I began my career the last thing I wanted to be labelled was a Canadian writer. I merely wished to become a writer. We all did, then. In 1930 our only novelist who had evolved out of the bush-league formulas of backwoodsmen, wild animals, coureurs des bois, and Loyalist settlers was Morley Callaghan. Inevitably he by-passed Toronto and published his first novel in New York, as I myself was to do some thirteen years later. Morley's course was swift and direct. Mine was slow and confused. Had I grown up in Toronto, even without associating as Morley did with those famous American expatriates in Paris, my situation as a beginning novelist might have been simpler. Toronto is not the New York of Canada, as I once heard it described by a Canadian. It is the Toronto of Canada, as I heard an American rebut the remark. Before Calgary got rich it was the most 'American' city we had, yet it was unmistakably itself until the influx of ethnics diluted the crudity of its puritanism. Recently I heard an American businessman pronounce that Toronto is the only city on the continent in which the American dream has been fulfilled. Such statements are provocative and perhaps meaningless. The University of

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Toronto is no Princeton or Yale, for which I say so thank we all our God. Yet in the near past Torontonians spoke in the idiom of the northern states and Morley Callaghan - no WASP, he - read their minds perfectly in his earlier novels and stories. But I hope this superbly honest writer and gallant human being will not take offence if I suggest that his finest novels were The Loved and the Lost and The Many Colored Coat. They were novels of his maturity, and he set them in Montreal. Myself, I was born in Cape Breton, where at the time a quarter of the population spoke Gaelic, and I grew up in Halifax where the speech idiom was half-way between Old England and New England. Ontario was far, far away. In my childhood I studied the ships, saw thousands of English sailors rolling along the downtown streets with the names of their cruisers written in golden letters on the headbands of their caps. I was a Canadian, but England was closer to me than Canada. In my late twenties, when after four years in England and Europe and three in the United States I finally found a depression job, I came to Montreal. I have lived there ever since and cannot agree with a pronouncement I recently heard, that Montreal is becoming the Boston of Canada. At any rate, Montrealers never spoke in the idiom of the United States even when they spoke English. I say all this because I doubt if my own background qualifies me as a spokesman for Canadian literature. The perennial question 'What is a Canadian?' is still with us in spite of the surge of nationalism which swelled up in the 19603. John Diefenbaker's 'average Canadian' - did he ever exist? In the early 1920$ Sinclair Lewis thought he had discovered the average American and called him Babbitt. Then came the great Papa of American literature, Hemingway, who asserted with truculence that he wrote 'American' and that what he wrote was a new kind of literature. However, he spent most of his life outside the United States and set his most famous novels in France, Spain, Italy, and Cuba. In 1920 the time was ripe for Papa. The United States had become the most powerful and exciting nation on earth and American writers were dominating fiction in the English-speaking world. Foreign readers believed that Americans were different and wished to learn more about them. Ambitious Canadian writers, myself among them for a time, did their best to join them, but unless they wrote formula-fiction like Thomas Costain, they could barely nibble the markets in the United States and Europe because of the perennial problem of recognition. What foreigner thought it worth his while to know about Canada? In those days what Canadian did? Americans accept on their coins the motto e pluribus unum, signifying that the states are truly united into a single national unit. On our coins in 1930 there was a profile of George v accompanied by Latin words identify-

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ing him as being, by the grace of God, King and Emperor of India. The same legend accompanied the image of his son George vi. But by the 19505 India was independent and Queen Elizabeth's image is now backed by the Bluenose on one coin and by a caribou's head on another. The old coins were real silver and worth their weight in bullion. The new ones are base metal, but the symbolism supporting the images indicates that we are no longer adherents to a non-existing empire, and that Canada is at least united under the Queen. But is she? Quebec would be delighted if the Queen's image vanished, and most of our provincial premiers are now doing their best to reverse the American motto into ex uno plures. To be a native-born Canadian is to be born in ambiguity and to be a native-born Canadian writer is to be doubly ambiguous. In the long run not even Morley Callaghan and Mordecai Richler were able to evade this fate. Whether we like it or not, we are stuck with one of the most ambiguous nations there ever was. At this moment of writing I am in the middle of another world crisis produced by the usual megalomaniacs, this time complicated by Hbombs, neutron bombs, lasers, and super-computers. I am also writing in the last week of a federal election in which we are informed by the media that we are voting for the man we dislike the least instead of the one we like the most. I have met no one who is not ashamed of this election, but I have met quite a few seniors who confess to be thinking back with shame-faced nostalgia to the days of Mackenzie King, who within his own person was the incarnation of the Canadian ambiguity. We elected him again and again, and he obliterated the opposition even while most of us professed to detest him. He was a mystery during his lifetime because he deliberately tried to make himself invisible. He was dead for twenty-five years before we at last discovered what he was really like. He understood the Canadian ambiguity without even having to think about it. To understand it he needed only to be himself, one lobe of his brain thinking with lethal accuracy in the present world, the other in the next. What did King need of bright young brain-trusters like Michael Pitfield and Jim Coutts when he could consult with the departed spirits of his mother and his dog? Under this man Canada was the most stable nation in the world, and as there was no television to destroy him, the ambiguities remained concealed. It is not like this now. A few lines from Pope's Essay on Man describes modern Canada: Placed on this isthmus of a middle state A being darkly wise and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride

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We hang between: in doubt to act, or rest... Chaos of thought and passion, all confused, Still by himself abused, or disabused ...

Here, of course, is a classic description of neurosis before that word entered the medical vocabulary. If an individual can be neurotic, even more so can a tribe or a nation, and for this we may be thankful, seeing that the alternative is likely to be psychosis. Better a self-worrying neurotic than the self-confidence of Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and the Ayatollah. The general neurosis described by Pope might be traced to man's treatment by the universal Creator, who not only made him as he is, but has shown no visible gratitude for the thousands of years of praise, prayers, sacrifices, and immolations that man has made to him. To a lesser extent our national neurosis had its origins in the behaviour of our headstrong national parents, France and England, abetted by the propaganda of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, who saw to it that we remained divided even after Confederation had united us. II

I shall now be entirely personal and go back to half a century ago. Where was I, and what was I doing, in the January of 1930? It took me at least a quarter of an hour's reflection before I could be sure I was remembering accurately. In January 1930 my status was that of Rhodes Scholar for Canada-atlarge, though I had never been farther west than the border between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. I was living in a small Ligurian fishing village called Lerici on the Golfo da Spezia, at the head of which the Italian navy had its western base. I was sharing a room with another Nova Scotian who was also at Oxford. Our bay windows looked out over Lerici Bay and beyond it to the wider waters of the gulf. Perched on a cliff at the bay's opening was an old stone castle, now disused. It was very picturesque and the local people told me (I suspect inaccurately) that King Francis i had been incarcerated there for nearly a year during one of his quarrels with the Holy Roman Emperor. On the far side of the gulf we could see the half-submerged ruins of an ancient Greek colony; it was called Porto Venere because legend had it that it was here that Aphrodite had risen from the waves. On the western rim of the bay stood a bleak stone house where Shelley had lived during the last year of his life and to which he was returning from Leghorn when his boat capsized and he was drowned. Behind the hotel were orange and walnut trees and a few palms and we ate walnuts and oranges every night for dessert. The foothills rose abruptly and were terraced into olive groves with the snow-crowned

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massif of the Appenine towering behind them. I thought Lerici the most enchanting place I had ever seen. I still do. The price of our lodging and meals (including afternoon tea) was $1.75 a day. As the only guests besides Alfred and myself were elderly English people, we dressed for dinner every night except Sundays. At dinner we ordered a flagon of Chianti Vecchio which cost us 15 cents. Alfred was reading Law and I was preparing for my final schools in Classical Moderations, commonly called Honour Mods. I can think of no course of study more inappropriately named, for there was nothing moderate about the curriculum. At the end of five terms we were required to sit for twelve examinations, two a day, and a single one of the twelve held us responsible for all forty-eight books of Homer and some twenty lengthy orations of Demosthenes and other Greek orators. For Oxford undergraduates vacations were the time for concentrated study, and Alfred and I worked from breakfast till lunch, walked and ran in the hills between lunch and tea, worked between tea and dinner and after dinner until 10:30. Before we went to sleep, we sat by the window watching the torches of the fishing boats flickering far out in the gulf, and if we were awake at dawn, we heard the fishermen singing as they drifted home with their catch. At tea we talked with the older guests and some of them were formidable. There was a British vice-admiral who hated Beatty and had recently published a book called The Jutland Scandal. He also walked in the hills after lunch, but with more purpose than Alfred and I. We occasionally came upon him standing on the edges of various cliffs with powerful binoculars held up to his eyes. He was studying the Italian heavy cruisers at target practice far out in the open sea. They were beautiful ships: the newest, fastest, and most powerful cruisers in the world, the admiral told us. He also told us that their shooting was so bad that he'd feel safer aboard the target than aboard the vessel that towed it. Eleven years later I remembered him when two of those cruisers were destroyed by the British off Cape Matapan. Also in the little hotel were several ladies of old and noble English and Scottish families, modest incomes, and the Catholic faith. One was the wife of a retired general of the Guards division and the aunt of a young man who was to become England's most famous commando leader in the Hitler war. Overwhelmingly fascinating to me was a sprightly, silverhaired English Jesuit who went out every day to paint landscapes. Shortly after we left for Oxford he was run out of Italy by the police because the landscapes he painted were the forts that defended the naval base. Having grown up in Halifax during the old war, I found it exciting to be living in the same place with people like these. Sometimes I found it startling. I had been taught that British statesmen were the most honourable and intelligent in the world, and the bottom dropped out of my faith

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when I listened to the Jesuit talking about Lloyd George, Baldwin, and Macdonald. But what did Canada mean to me then? It certainly meant that I was often homesick. It meant pride because she was part of the British Empire, which made me feel superior to our materialistic southern neighbours. It meant pride in the wonderful record of our athletes in the 1928 Olympics and of course a far greater pride in the country's record in the Kaiser's war. It meant the Halifax Explosion and the excitement of growing up in the greatest of all convoy ports. It meant cold clean winters and cold seas crashing against the Nova Scotian coasts. It meant the Cape Breton colliery town where I was born and the magnificent vistas of the Bras d'Or Lakes and the north shore of the island. But of Canada herself - the vast land that began west of Nova Scotia - it meant an ignorance almost total. I had no prejudice against French Canadians. The only ones I knew were two Rhodes scholars who spoke perfect English and had more cachet than we Anglophones because the English thought of us as colonials and thought of them as French. At school I had learned nothing about Quebec except that the St Lawrence ran through it, that Cartier had discovered it, that Champlain had founded Quebec City in 1608, and that a century and a half later Wolfe the dauntless hero had planted firm Britannia's flag on Canada's fair domain. I had never heard of the voyageurs and the Northwest Company. None of my schoolbooks had informed me that Québécois canoe-men had explored most of North America as far south as the Gulf of Mexico and as far west as the Rockies before the Americans of the eastern seaboard had worked their way through the Appalachians. I had, however, been taught to memorize long lists of English kings and to read about wars and battles which the English had always won. Canadian literature? I had never heard of such a thing. I had assumed that everything written in English belonged to the literature of our common language. I had read with eager delight every book written by Charles G.D. Roberts, but it did not occur to me that he was performing in literature a task similar to that performed in painting by the Group of Seven, of whom I had also never heard. I had read Lampman and Carman, but Leacock irritated me because he seemed like an Englishman pretending to write like a smart-alec Yank. (This opinion I was to change after I moved into the interior.) Morley Callaghan had already published a novel and a book of short stories, but I did not know it. Neither did I know that a young American had published a novel called The Sun Also Rises four years previously. In 1930 my ambition was to become a classical scholar and a poet. Not a 'Canadian' poet, merely a poet. Apart from the Greeks, Romans, and Shakespeare, my favourite poets were Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and Tennyson. It was thrilling to know that I was treading

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where Shelley had trod, and one day when the olives were bending and tossing in a gale from the Tyrrhenian Sea I stood among them and declaimed the 'Ode to the West Wind' to an audience of myself. I was just getting over an adolescent infatuation with Rupert Brooke, but was unaware that his love poems had not been inspired by girls. Among modern writers I had never heard of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, John Dos Passes, or Scott Fitzgerald, and I thought that American literature must be pretty dull if its best living writer was Sinclair Lewis. As a final proof that ignorance can be bliss, in that January of 19301 was so engrossed in my examinations, in making the college rugger team and the university tennis team, that I did not know that the Wall Street stock market had collapsed. Three years later I was in Princeton working for a PH D and the market crash was the main reason for my being there. When I got home from Oxford there were no jobs. Almost as bad as this, a week before I left for Princeton I was notified that the teaching fellowship they had promised me had been cancelled because there was no money for it. By this time a lately aroused critical faculty had made me realize that, though I might become a writer, I would never become a poet. Soon afterwards I learned something else: even with a PH D in my pocket and a recovery of the economy there would be no academic job for me in North America. The classics in which I had been trained for twelve years were being ousted from the universities in favour of sociology, political science, psychology, and Eng Lit, and the time was at hand when not one university president in twenty would be able to read the degrees he handed out at his convocations. Economically, my only hope was to write my way out. But it was not economics that had turned me to writing fiction. It was a pure compulsion. In addition to the long hours I spent on the PH D, I wrote a complete novel in my first Princeton year. It never entered my mind to send the script to a Canadian publisher. I sent it to a small firm in New York which accepted it, kept it for a year, and then went bankrupt. I was half-way through a much longer novel when finally I left Princeton with the degree and the manuscript and came home to unemployment, which lasted for six weeks into mid-October in 1935 before I was offered a job in Montreal, teaching school for a salary of $1,000 a year. I arrived in Montreal on a Saturday morning and immediately began working on the novel. A year later I married Dorothy Duncan, an American girl I had met aboard ship three years earlier on my way home from Oxford. She also wished to write. My salary was raised to $1,800 and we settled into our lives in Montreal. Now, as every writer knows, his perennial problem in addition to practising an unstable and difficult trade is bound to be economic. So, in comparing the prospects of a young novelist today with those of a young novelist in the 19303, the time has come to talk about prices.

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Dorothy and I found an apartment with a good view for $50 a month and monthly garage space for $2.50 for the second-hand Pontiac she had bought in Chicago for $350. Movie tickets went for 50 cents, gasoline sold generally for less than 15 cents a gallon, seats at the Forum for the hockey games (we were both fans) could be had for from 50 cents to $1.25. A twenty-five-ounce bottle of ale cost 15 cents with 5 cents back if you returned the empty, and it was much better ale than you can get now because it was brewed slowly and carefully. Dinner at the city's most select restaurant was generally beyond our means: it cost $1.10 a person. These figures, I think, establish beyond argument that it was easier in the thirties for a neophyte novelist to exist while learning his trade than it is now - providing, of course, that he had a job that paid enough to keep him off the bread lines. It was after my first three years in Montreal that I finally learned the most important lesson of my literary life. I learned that, whether I liked it or not, I had to be a 'Canadian' writer if I was to become a writer at all. This is how it happened. My first novel, the one that foundered with my bankrupt publisher in New York, had been about Nova Scotian bootleggers running liquor into the eastern states and having various adventures with the American police. I can't even remember the names of the characters. The second book was much more ambitious. Partly it was set in the States, but mostly it was set in Germany and Middle Europe, and its climax was the destruction of the Austrian socialists by Dolfuss and the Austrian fascists in 1934. I knew much more about Europe than I knew about Canada because, after Lerici, I had spent all my vacations in Germany working for my examinations and learning the language. In Princeton I had become a Marxist, but I never carried a card because I could not endure the party communists I met. In Montreal all my friends were socialists. Anyway, I finished this novel in the spring of 1937 and sent it to my agent in New York. I also replied to an ad in the old Saturday Review of Literature which offered a free trip to Scandinavia and Russia to anyone who could speak German and was willing to guide a tour. The sponsor who accepted me turned out to be a Montreal travel agent who did business with the CPR and the Amerop Company of Berlin. The tour itself consisted of only two people besides my sister and myself, so I had little work to do. We admired the co-operatives in Denmark and Sweden, spent a day in Helsinki, and took the night express for Leningrad, I being thrilled that we would disembark in the same Finland Station which had welcomed Lenin's sealed train in 1917. While we waited for hours in the huge immigration atrium of the Finland Station I witnessed a performance that permanently erased my belief that Lenin had been a blessing to mankind. The walls were covered with murals, crudely painted, of revolutionary heroes in various postures

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of oratory and two little men were working their way along the walls with ladders and paint pots. They were painting out the faces of the heroes who had been liquidated the week before and, looking around, I realized that more faces had been painted out than remained. This was the second year of Stalin's purges, the one that wiped out nearly all the communists who had made the revolution. Three weeks later we came back through Poland, our train crowded to the doors with soldiers, for the country was under total mobilization. On the German frontier we saw huge, jack-booted ss guards pacing poundingly back and forth before each car. Then they slammed open the doors of one compartment after another, stared at us, and in quietly sinister voices demanded our passports. We arrived in Berlin in the middle of a mock air-raid with hundreds of Stukas diving to the roof tops, their engines screaming so loud they hurt the eardrums, then zooming up again and repeating the performance. To anyone who witnessed it this meant war, and war soon. When finally I reached home, I lost some of my socialist friends when I predicted that Stalin would soon make a pact with Hitler because it was the logical thing for him to do. I claim no credit for the foresight; I was merely repeating what a British military attaché had told me in the Métropole Hotel in Moscow. My novel was still in New York and it was not until a year later, around the time of the Munich Crisis, that it was rejected by the twenty-second publisher to whom my agent sent it. The short note accompanying the rejection taught me the lesson I mentioned earlier. The manuscript carried my name, but the address was my agent's office. This was what that letter said: 'We do not know who your author is. He does not write like an American and he does not write like an Englishman. There is something strange about this manuscript.' When I grasped the meaning of this letter, I groaned, for its implications jumped before me like the premises of a syllogism. First: our sensibilities are formed in childhood and therefore are produced to some extent by the societies in which we are born. Secondly: drama depends, as Aristotle had pointed out, on recognitions - that is, the audience must know the general features of the background of the story if he is to be interested in it. Thirdly: Canada is unknown in everything social and human that matters. Conclusion: if I were to become an authentic novelist, I would have to make the background of my story recognizable to readers both inside and outside my own country, for in those days a novelist could get nowhere if he wrote only for Canada. So vanished the illusion that I might be able to leap onto the international or even the American stage simply by writing, as many critics urged, 'a good book.' I knew at the time that I would be put down as a 'didactic' writer, and this duly happened. A poet can be private in a way no novelist can; if it were not for the language barrier, he could reach across all national boundaries

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as easily as a musician. 'O western wind, when wilt thou blow I That the small rain down may rain...' This is eternal and universal. But the novel draws its life from a society which is not universal in its social details. In the Canada of forty years ago there were great social themes. There were also great social themes in Chile. But what reader in New York or London could have been interested in a novel of Chile before the IT&T, combined with Allende's idealistic simplicity, made that unhappy country a rebuke to the morality of the great powers, be they communist or capitalist? In this respect there can be no comparison between the avenues of communication open to a Canadian novelist of today and those of even twenty years ago. Canada has lost her innocence, and with a vengeance. With an eagerness almost indecent we have jumped aboard the rollercoaster, hell-bound for the precipice. Joe Clark's High River, I have no doubt, is more morally salubrious than Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, but its old-fashioned values command no respect among our new megalopolitans. Wendell Willkie was an ass and a first-rate PR man. But when he coined the phrase that we are all living today in 'One World', he was right on. Preposterously he thought it a good thing that we are. This sounds bitter, and it is. On the roller-coaster we are, placed there by the servants of the multinationals and a post-war generation that didn't want to be there but certainly didn't want to remain puritan colonials or priest-ridden Québécois. Here is tragedy, a moral tragedy universal in our time. We now have many excellent young writers in Canada. Canadian literature is even taught in our schools and colleges. The novel must be involved with morality - good or bad, but it cannot ingore it - and in this respect the international market has become wide open to our writers. No need any more to explain Canada. Every aspect of her national life today has echoes everywhere else in the world. So, one might say, the world at last is wide open to a young Canadian wanting to write fiction. But is it really wide open to anyone wanting to write fiction that is seriously intended - to anyone, be he English, French, or American? Canada Council grants can help young Canadian novelists of promise, but they cannot guarantee that the books they write will be published. In a capitalist society you swim or sink in the market, which is better than in a communist society where you will be sent to jail or a lunatic asylum if you write the truth. But certainly the economics of the literary market have made the prospects of a young Canadian novelist worse than they were when Canada's population was half what it is now. Ill

Hard-cover novels, the only ones which are reviewed, have almost been priced out of the market today. Let me compare the market now with the market from thirty to twenty years ago.

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At the beginning of the 19405 any novel of normal length, well printed and flexibly bound in good stock, sold for $2.50. By 1945 the price had risen to $3.00, and this price held fairly well into the fifties, at the end of which the price had risen to just under $5.00. The paperback revolution had been under way for a decade, but soon it took command of the market. In 1967, for example, with the price of a hard-back novel up to just under $6.00, a New York publisher was happy if he sold as many as 15,000 copies in the huge American market. This year my publishers tell me that my last novel (which I finished at the end of 1979) will be offered at $14.95. F°r novels in hard cover, which means nearly all serious ones, this is ruinous economics, and the first-line publisher could not exist without his share of the paperback trade which, he hopes, will follow within less than a year. In the publishing of fiction today the tail is wagging the dog. This problem is not so great in the non-fiction market. In the first place, most serious readers over the age of forty prefer non-fiction to fiction, and at that time of life many of them are sufficiently affluent to afford the high prices. Secondly, every novel is a pig in a poke, and in a world in which the real powers are hidden, mature readers are fascinated by books which tell them the inside story. They are also fascinated by historical works, and now that non-fiction is so much better written than it used to be, any novelist is hard put to match it in excitement. I would guess that today non-fiction outsells fiction in hard cover by more than seven to one. Even in the Canadian market writers like Farley Mowat, Pierre Berton, and Peter Newman have tapped hard-cover markets that no novelist could dream of. But as my subject is fiction, I shall return to it. The contrast between the hard-cover fiction market of today with that of yesterday is worse than discouraging, especially to the beginning novelist. Before television, novels played a significant role in entertainment. Almost every novel published was assured of a conscientious review in the weekly book sections of the metropolitan dailies. The Sunday edition of the New York Times could be bought in Canada for 15 cents and most serious readers never missed it. Better still for the beginning writer were the lending libraries. In New York City there must have been several hundreds of them, and in our own large towns every department store had one .Books were lent at the rate of from 3 to 5 cents a day, and many shoppers had the habit of picking up two or three novels every Saturday. This meant that the first-line publisher could expect a sure sale of up to 2,000 copies of any first novel which received a favourable review. At the same time, if a novel took off, it was common for it to sell from half a million to a million copies in its first year. So far as the reading public was concerned, the climate was far better for fictionwriters than it is now. It was much easier then for a young writer to make a start. Yet, in those golden years of fiction the financial rewards open to a

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writer in our ambiguous country were disastrously small. Nearly all the Toronto publishing houses were mere branch plants of English firms. Their first function was to distribute English books to the Canadian public; their second to act as jobbers for American books. This meant that a Canadian writer who published in New York and received from 30 to 45 cents a copy in American royalties, received from his Canadian sales a royalty of from 5 to 10 cents a copy. The rest went to the jobber and the American publisher. If the author published first in Canada, he would almost certainly be published nowhere else, and if his book did break through, some of the Toronto firms would claim every cent that it earned in the foreign market. Again, it was not until 1947 that the Canadian tax authorities ceased classifying an author's royalties as 'unearned income.' This was not malice; it was bureaucratic ignorance and indifference, arising from a semantic ambiguity applied to the word 'royalty.' If royalties on oil shares were 'unearned/ so, according to the Department of National Revenue in Ottawa, were royalties on books. This turned the case of the late Gwethalyn Graham into a horror story. Gwethalyn Graham's novel Earth and High Heaven was by far the greatest commercial success of any novel written by a Canadian about Canadians. The first exposure of anti-Semitism in purely human terms written by a Gentile author, it appeared towards the end of the Hitler war when millions of people were discovering in their personal lives what a blight this kind of prejudice is. Her novel stood at the top of the American best-seller lists for more than a year and sold more than a million copies. A Hollywood studio bought it for $100,000, but the studio boss, who regarded the book (in his own words) as 'sacred,' was so dissatisfied with the movie scripts that it never reached the screen. It was also sold for serialization in Collier's Magazine for $40,000. It went into many translations, and hundreds of thousands of copies were issued in the American Armed Forces edition (for this edition no novelist received compensation; it was his contribution to the war effort). Naturally people thought that Gwethalyn had become a rich woman over night. Then came the Canadian tax man. According to wartime legislation all income classified as 'unearned' was virtually confiscated, a law the government considered just because when the war was over the shares would still belong to their owners and no capital would be lost. This meant that Gwethalyn could have been left, legally, with little more than $10,000, and that all the rest of her earnings would be scooped up by the Department of National Revenue. She appealed to Ottawa and they made what they called a settlement in equity. How much they allowed her I do not know, but I doubt if it was much more than $35,000. She was an enormously generous woman and she gave away considerable sums to help stranded war refugees. Again, I do not know how much. But I do

FICTION IN CANADA 4!

know that when she died prematurely of a brain tumour at the age of fifty, she was earning her living by marking themes for a Montreal high school. After Earth and High Heaven she was never able to write another book. In the late 19405 the Canadian Authors' Association finally took successful action against the exploitation of native writers by the government and the Toronto branch-plant publishers. In dealing with the revenue department I myself was the guinea-pig. Working with the late Rod Kennedy, then the president of the CAA, we presented our brief to Ottawa on the basis of my own royalties from Two Solitudes. My income was nothing comparable to Gwethalyn's. In the United States Two Solitudes sold in its first year about 30,000 copies; in Canada during the same time about 68,000. The standard American royalties came through according to the contract, and because the war was over, they were not regarded as 'unearned' income in Ottawa. On the standard royalty rates obtaining in New York, this sale would have been worth about $30,000, a considerable sum in those days. But as a result of the jobber's cut it brought me about $4,500 in Canadian earnings. Two measures were necessary, therefore, to give a Canadian author a chance of survival. The first was to persuade the tax people to allow him to distribute his literary income over the number of years it had taken him to write the book. We asked for the same treatment here that writers were granted in England, and the revenue department settled for a spread of three years. Of much greater importance was the acceptance of a separate Canadian contract. The New York publishers did not like this solution because it would cut them off from a percentage of the Canadian sales. However, they were not prepared to make trouble because, as my own publisher said, 'we regard the Canadian market as mere chicken feed.' The real opposition came from the Toronto publishing industry, some of whose editors threatened the membership of the CAA with a boycott on their books if they voted for the resolution. But there was, thank God, at least one Canadian publisher who went with us all the way. John Gray of Macmillan's of Canada, Ltd, to whom Harold Macmillan in London had given a fairly free hand, accepted the principle of the separate Canadian contract. From that decision, I think, can be dated the beginning of a genuine Canadian book industry supported by our own publishers. The standard contract was drawn up by Gwethalyn Graham and Dorothy Duncan, accepted by the Canadian Authors' Association, and so far as I know it has not been challenged since. I return again to the main theme of this paper: the prospects open to Canadian novelists today in comparison with those of the past. In some respects they are better, in others much worse. On the good side, nobody today asks the question that was put to me for years in the old days; 'Why do you bother writing about Canada?'

42 HUGH MAC LENNAN

There is a genuine enthusiasm for Canadian books all over the country, especially among the young. In foreign countries there is also a growing acceptance of them (not, I would guess, in London); since 1960 three of my own novels have been published in many editions in Germany and one of them, still in print there, has sold about 250,000 copies in various editions over a period of nineteen years. It was not until the mid-fifties that Europe had sufficiently recovered from the war to be able to afford new literature. Also, in the United States Canada is less thought of as a void than it used to be. Finally, as I have already said, there are many more able writers working in Canada than ever before, and many of them are already established in foreign markets. The other side of the coin, however, is not good at all. As a result of the price of books, the paperback trade is basic to the publication of fiction. Paperbacks are sold in the same spirit as goods are sold in Steinberg's and Loblaw's - the kind of books in demand are those you see there. In an age where traditional time-perspectives have been shot almost out of existence, when today's sensation has been swallowed up by another sensation a week later, fiction in new paperbacks is engulfed in a tide of pornography and stories of violence which are skilfully developed according to standard formulas. We read them in airplanes, buses, and trains, frequently they hold us to the end because they are ruthlessly paced, but a fortnight later we find it hard to remember even the characters' names, much less their fates. This is a situation which is damaging the chances of good fiction even in the United States. The flood of meaningless and vulgar trash has reached the point where even the paper-back trade is cannibalizing itself. At the end of 1979 four or five of the American paperback firms collapsed, with the result that the hardcover publishers are more fearful than ever of publishing novels even by established writers, the paperback publishers themselves being unwilling, at least for the time being, to contract for new titles. If I have written so much about economics, it is because economics is basic to the very survival of the novel, not only in Canada but in all of North America. Who knows, at the moment, how many good novels are being rejected in the United States because the first-line publishers are unable to market them in a time when bad fiction is relentlessly driving good fiction out of the market, and is itself being battered by the law of diminishing returns?

GÉRARD BESSETTE

Romancier(s) québécois

Après avoir relu en entier le présent article, je me suis rendu compte qu'il se divisait en deux volets distincts. Le premier - assez général - gravite autour du roman québécois des quarante dernières années; le deuxième mémorialisant - concerne mon œuvre. I

Dans sa lettre d'invitation où il m'annonçait ce numéro festoyant du University of Toronto Quarterly, son sympathique associate editor déclarait d'abord que sa vénérable revue s'intéressait surtout au 'développement du genre romanesque entre 1930 et 1980 vu de l'intérieur par le romancier.' Puis il posait la question suivante: 'Est-ce que les conditions nécessaires à la création romanesque se sont améliorées pendant ces cinquante années? Se sont-elle dégradées?' Les circonstances collectives (psycho-sociales) propices à la création et à la publication me semblent s'être améliorées chez nous au cours du dernier demi-siècle. Le rejet du catholicisme par la grande majorité des créateurs québécois a sûrement exercé une influence bénéfique. Chez les plus vieux - ceux de ma génération - le catholicisme a constitué un puissant pôle encombrant dont il s'agissait de se libérer. Ce pôle a perdu de sa force chez la génération qui a vu le jour dans les années trente et quarante pour disparaître tout à fait - en autant qu'on puisse juger - chez les plus jeunes. Si bien que, à la suite de la flambée séparatiste - je dis bien: séparatiste et non pas souveraineuse-associante - qui avait galvanisé la plupart des jeunes intellectuels - créateurs ou non - l'intelligentsia récente s'est trouvée comme désamorcée et flottante à la suite de la victoire-surprise de René Lévesque. Toutefois, comme ce changement de régime a suivi de près le coming of age littéraire de la première fournée cégépienne, dont maint observateur a affirmé qu'elle était illettrée (illettrisme qu'elle semble d'ailleurs partager avec une grande partie de la jeunesse occidentale et sûrement Canadian), ne nous étonnons pas que la relève de la génération des Marie-Claire Blais-Réjean Ducharme-VictorLevy Beaulieu-Gilbert La Rocque ne se soit pas encore manifestée. Parallèlement à la quasi-disparition du catholicisme, la création du Conseil des arts (du Canada) a, en aidant le monde de l'édition et des

44 GÉRARD BESSETTE

écrivains, joué un rôle de première importance et nettement positif. (Je dirai tantôt un mot de ses effets secondaires: au sens pharmaceutique du terme.) Par contre, il ne semble pas que l'évolution des idées, des partis ou des régimes politiques ait produit une incidence notable sur la production romanesque - bien que, naturellement, elle ait fait couler beaucoup d'encre journalistique et essayiste. L'amélioration du niveau de vie a constitué un autre facteur bénéfique. Elle a permis à un nombre accru de jeunes d'origine non-bourgeoise d'accéder à l'écriture romanesque (ou à l'écriture tout court). A ma connaissance nulle enquête n'a encore été menée là-dessus. Elle nous fournirait des renseignements précieux. Toutefois, les complexités socio-économico-politiques n'étant pas dans mes cordes, je me bornerai à un survol (subjectif) de l'état du roman québécois de l'après-guerre. Les romanciers qui, indépendamment de leur âge, appartiennent à une génération littéraire antérieure à la mienne (Gabrielle Roy, Yves Thériault, Roger Lemelin) sont bien connus. Aussi n'en dirai-je qu'un mot. Les deux premiers gardent leur importance, alors que l'étoile de Lemelin - partiellement à cause de son silence romanesque - a notablement baissé. D'autre part, Trente arpents reste un monument de première grandeur - même s'il a quelque peu vieilli - alors que Le Survenant et compagnie tendent à se perdre dans la grisaille du passé. Menaud est-il en train de subir le même sort? Je n'ose l'affirmer car il s'agit là d'un livre dont la notoriété m'a toujours confondu. Quant aux écrivains de ma génération (littéraire) qui se sont fait un nom - en tant que romanciers - grosso modo en même temps que moi (je pense à Anne Hébert, qui était déjà établie comme poétesse, et à Jacques Perron, déjà connu comme dramaturge), ils partagent avec moi la caractéristique d'être des romanciers tardifs: Hébert a fait paraître Les Chambres de bois à 42 ans; Perron a publié Cotnoir à 39 ans, et moi La Bagarre à 38. Cette tardiveté fait contraste avec nos successeurs - ceux qu'on a appelé les Romanciers du Jour (lancés ou relancés par Jacques Hébert) qui furent en général fort précoces. Sans parler de Biais, à peine âgée de 19 ans lorsque fut publié La Belle Bête (1959), indiquons qu'André Major et Beaulieu avaient respectivement 22 et 23 ans à la parution de leur première œuvre romanesque, alors que Jacques Benoit et La Rocque étaient encore loin de la trentaine. Jean Basile, lui, avait 29 ans lorsque Lorenzo vit le jour. La tardiveté des vieux - ou des vieillissants (dont je suis) - et la précocité des jeunes Romanciers du Jour a produit ce qu'on pourrait appeler une 'confusion générationnelle' - que les historiens futurs devront débrouiller. Songeons, par exemple, que Biais a publié son premier roman la même année que Perron, et que VLB, qui pourrait être le fils biologique du toubib longueuillois, a fait paraître son premier-né seulement une décennie

ROMANCIER(S) QUÉBCXDIS 45 après celui de son père spirituel, dont il ne semble pas, d'ailleurs, s'être encore inspiré à ce moment-là. En dehors des Romanciers du Jour - sur lesquels je reviendrai - il faut mentionner le groupe Tisseyre (Cercle du Livre de France) qui (je parle des têtes de peloton), à l'exception d'Hubert Aquin, se compose presque exclusivement de femmes, dont aucune, me semble-t-il, ne fait partie de nos meilleurs romanciers. Claire Martin, après une carrière littéraire honorable, garde maintenant le silence. A la suite d'un début prometteur, Diane Giguère a sombré dans la médiocrité. Seule Louise Maheux-Forcier a su maintenir une production régulière à un niveau élevé mais sans jamais atteindre la vraie grandeur. Yvette Naubert au contraire, avec L'Eté de la cigale, injustement négligé, a signé l'un de nos meilleurs romans, à la fois original et vivant. Nul autre écrivain québécois n'a mieux réussi une œuvre romanesque située à l'étranger. Le premier tome des Pierrefendre, malgré sa technique intéressante (mais quelque peu artificielle), occupe un niveau nettement inférieur à L'Eté de la cigale. Reste Aquin qui, malgré sa tardive et malheureuse migration à La Presse, fait partie de l'écurie Tisseyre. Je ne me sens pas à l'aise pour parler de lui, qui est devenu le monstre sacré par excellence et dont malgré l'allant vertigineux de Prochain épisode - la réputation littéraire me paraît surfaite. Ses dédoublements, ses pirouettes et ses jeux de miroirs en point de fuite m'ont toujours semblé artificiels et contournés ... Mais un romancier qui en juge un autre est sujet à caution. C'est le risque calculé qu'a pris Ben Shek en me demandant cet article. En dehors du Jour et du Cercle du Livre, il faut mentionner deux romanciers qui ont 'choisi' - sauf erreur, parce qu'on les avait refusés ici de publier en France. Tout comme Aquin, Ducharme a débuté sa carrière de romancier de façon éclatante. Et, jusqu'à ces dernières années, peutêtre parce qu'il a publié ses trois premières œuvres chronologiquement à rebours, L'Avalée des avalés restait sa meilleure réussite malgré son papillotage et ses jeux de mots agaçants. Mais L'Hiver deforce (1973), qui suivit l'innommable navet intitulé La Fille de Christophe Colomb (qui a fait dire à certains que Gallimard était un marchand de légumes), L'Hiver de force, dis-je, est venu confirmer le talent de Ducharme et constitue sa meilleure réussite. Jacques Godbout, l'homme-orchestre de notre monde artistique (seule la musique manque à son arc!), publie, lui aussi, dans la mère-patrie. Original et brillant, son premier roman, L'Aquarium (1962), m'avait inspiré de grands espoirs que les livres subséquents n'ont pas vraiment comblés. Malgré la notoriété de Salut Galarneau et le succès d'estime de ses autres œuvres, les romans de Godbout, plutôt superficiels et comme sautillants, sont nettement inférieurs à Jos Connaissant et aux Grands-pères (Beaulieu) et surtout à Serge d'entre les morts (La Rocque). Voilà qui nous ramène aux Romanciers du Jour dont j'ai enumeré

46 GÉRARD BESSETTE

ci-dessus les plus marquants: (par ordre alphabétique) Jean Basile, VictorLevy Beaulieu, Jacques Benoit, Marie-Claire Biais, Gilbert La Rocque, André Major. Certains sont encore non seulement 'en production' mais en progrès: ce sont Major et La Rocque dont les dernières œuvres sont les meilleures (Les Rescapés, Serge d'entre les morts). D'autres de leurs confrères - comme Biais et Beaulieu - sont 'en surproduction/ et la qualité de leurs romans s'en ressent. L'auteur d'Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel, après avoir nettement régressé, me paraît piétiner depuis bon nombre d'années. Quant à Beaulieu, depuis les sommets que constituent Jos Connaissant et Les Grands-pères, il s'empêtre dans un verbalisme brouillon et marécageux. A l'instar du Perron de naguère, un daimôn néfaste semble le pousser à publier coûte que coûte, comme si la quantité pouvait tenir lieu de qualité. Les deux derniers romanciers cités plus haut paraissent au contraire avoir déposé la plume. Benoit n'a rien fait paraître depuis sept ans, alors que Basile garde le silence depuis une décennie. Le dernier roman de Benoit - Les Princes - était pourtant de loin le mieux réussi. Et nous devons à Basile, avec La Jument des Mongols et Le Grand Khan, deux de nos bons romans de l'après-guerre. On ne saurait attribuer ces divers phénomènes - production ascendante, surproduction médiocre, non-production - à des causes générales. Malgré les postes exigeants et chronophagiques qu'ils occupent, Major et La Rocque réussissent à approfondir leur art tout en publiant avec une tranquille régularité. Beaulieu, lui, se livre à une incontinente graphorrée plutôt que de mettre la pédale douce et d'élaborer avec lenteur une nouvelle œuvre digne de son énorme talent. (Mais à quoi bon ces critiques ou suggestions? Chacun ne doit-il se débattre avec les exigences de ses pulsions et de son surmoi?) De la variété sus-indiquée, il ne faudrait pas conclure que, au plan technique, les romanciers des deux générations que je viens d'énumérer n'ont rien en commun. Tous écrivent en effet ce qu'on peut appeler au sens large des nouveaux-romans. L'intrigue et surtout le suspense n'y jouent plus qu'un rôle secondaire. (D'ordinaire le dévoilement déchronologique de la trame remplace son déroulement-enchaînement de type causal.) De même les personnages sont plus ondoyants et divers, multistrates et complexes que leurs prédécesseurs issus du i9ëme siècle balzacien-flaubertien-zolien. A tous ces points de vue, la brisure s'est effectué entre la génération (romanesque) de Roy et la suivante, c'est-à-dire vers 1960, qui est une année-clef dans l'histoire du Québec aussi bien en littérature qu'en politique. Dans le roman récent, il semble y avoir encore prédominence du JE sur le IL, du moins jusqu'en 1970, comme je l'ai indiqué dans plusieurs conférences sans jamais coucher la chose dans un article. Depuis lors, une fusion-confusion pronominale où le NOUS-VOUS (c'est-à-dire le collectif)

ROMANCIER(S) QUÉBCÎOIS 47 concurrence ou contamine le JE semble en train de s'instaurer, sans parler des JE multiples (voir Kamouraska et Le Cycle) ou encore de la rapide navette ELLE-JE JE-ELLE (puisque nous avons affaire à une protagoniste) qui caractérise Après la boue de La Rocque. Tous ces traits communs et ces variations se décanteront avec le temps. Les arbres nous empêchent encore de voir la forêt. Cela n'est guère préoccupant. L'Histoire (tout court ou littéraire) ainsi que ses tendancesfluctuations finissent toujours par se clarifier tôt ou tard. Ce qui m'inquiète davantage, c'est que, après les Romanciers du Jour, à l'instar de la sœur Anne de madame Barbe-Bleu, je ne vois rien venir (au plan littéraire)... II

La partie personnelle-subjective du présent texte doit son origine à la récente critique de Mes romans et moi1 par Réjean Robidoux, parue dans Lettres québécoises (avril 1979). Avant de parcourir ce compte rendu, je ne croyais pas revenir à mes mémoires-réminiscences d'ici plusieurs années. Mais la myopie tatillonne et constamment dépréciative de Robidoux m'a fait changer d'avis. J'estime séant d'apporter quelques précisions sur Mes romans et moi tout en réfutant certaines affirmations-insinuations de mon critique. Dès le départ, en se basant sur un bon mot d'Albert Thibaudet, qu'il prend au pied de la lettre,2 Robidoux déclare que Mes romans et moi est un roman au même titre que mes autres œuvres romanesques. Cherchant ensuite la petite bête, il s'appuie sur certaines imprécisions, 'omissions' ou légères inexactitudes qu'il relève dans mon texte pour (censément) étayer ses jugements subjectifs. De toute évidence, Mes romans et moi ont frotté mon critique à rebrousse-poil, surtout lorsqu'il est question du père.3 Tout se passe comme si Robidoux - dont je ne mets pas en doute l'amitié à mon égard - s'imaginait que la lecture de certains de mes inédits et la préparation de La Commensale (de laquelle je lui sais gré) lui donnaient sur ma propre biographie et sur les influences (paternelles) que j'ai subies des lumières que je ne possède pas moi-même. Il n'ose mettre ouvertement en doute l'année de la mort de mon père - survenue le 13 avril 1959 - mais son texte laisse percer un certain scepticisme: 'Mis à part ce millésime précis, lisons-nous dans son compte rendu (trop grave - mort du père - pour que je le croie fictif), tout le reste flotte' (p 43). Robidoux exprime des doutes plus poussés sur le moment où se situe, d'après mon texte, la rédaction de La Bagarre et du Libraire. Pour apaiser ses angoisses chronologiques, je préciserai donc que mon père a subi son attaque d'apoplexie au début de l'été 1956, tout probablement en juin (les souvenirs de ma mère et de ma sœur confirment ici les miens). J'ai fait à ce moment-là le voyage de Pittsburgh (où j'habitais) à Montréal pour aller voir mon père à

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l'hôpital Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc où il gisait partiellement paralysé. Au bout de quelques semaines, comme il se trouvait hors de danger, quoique diminué, je suis retourné à Pittsburgh et me suis attelé à la rédaction de La Bagarre, que je complétai fin 1956 ou début 1957. Quant au Libraire, c'est de tous mes romans celui que j'ai rédigé le plus rapidement: en quelques mois, vraisemblablement au cours des grandes vacances de 1957. En tout cas, comme le rappelle Robidoux, il était terminé au printemps de 1958 lors de mon déménagement de Pittsburgh à Kingston. Robidoux affirme que le père n'a pas grand'chose à voir avec Le Libraire. C'est donc que, sans vouloir l'affirmer ouvertement (ou peut-être l'a-t-il oublié), il rejette mon interprétation voulant que le père Manseau soit un substitut paternel. Mais passons. Notre chercheur de petite bête n'admet pas davantage que c'est à partir de La Bagarre - c'est-à dire à un moment où papa était déjà condamné que j'ai voulu le 'dépasser.' Selon Robidoux, ce désir de dépassement (ne pourrait-on pas d'ailleurs parler plutôt de résignation?) devait remonter beaucoup plus loin et devancer 'd'au moins dix ans le moment fatidique/ puisque mes Poèmes temporels parurent avant La Bagarre. De toute évidence, mon 'recenseur' se réfère ici à la rédaction et non pas à la publication des deux ouvrages, parus à quatre années d'intervalle. De fait, à l'exception des deux dernières pièces, mes Poèmes temporels furent composés avant mon départ pour Saskatoon (en qualité à.'instructor in French) à l'automne de 1946. (La rédaction du Coureur remonte à l'été de 1942 ou 1943, alors que j'étais étudiant à l'Ecole normale Jacques-Cartier.) Grosso modo, les dates sembleraient donc donner raison à Robidoux. Il en va tout autrement au plan de l'affectivité. J'ai peut-être eu tort de ne pas donner dans Mes romans et moi plus de détails psychologiques. Je réservais ce domaine - et le réserve encore dans l'ensemble - pour mes futurs 'mémoires totaux,' posthumes ou anthymes selon ma longévité et les circonstances. Cependant, rien ne m'empêche d'indiquer dès à présent - puisque cela ne comporte rien d'intime ni de gênant - que ma situation de dépendance économique et, par conséquent, morale envers mon père avait tout à fait changé entre la rédaction de Poèmes temporels et celle de La Bagarre. Au contraire, à la date de leur parution, ma situation était identique; sauf que, entre les deux, était intervenu le 'moment fatidique' - à retardement - de l'attaque d'apoplexie paternelle. Les médecins en effet ne m'avaient laissé aucun espoir sur le rétablissement de mon père. De fait, après une légère remontée suivie d'une période ambulatoire apparemment stable, il se mit à dépérir peu à peu pour s'éteindre au bout de quelques trois ans. Au cours des années 1942-6 (rédaction des futurs Poèmes temporels), mon père était en bonne santé et travaillait encore. Sauf erreur, il ne devait prendre sa retraite qu'en 1952, à l'âge de 72 ans. Comme j'étais retourné aux études après un an comme commis gratte-papier à la Mont-

ROMANCIER(S) QUÉBÓOIS 49 real Tramways Company (1941-2), je me trouvais derechef économiquement sous sa dépendance. C'est seulement en 1946, comme je l'ai noté, que je commençai à gagner régulièrement ma vie dans le domaine où j'allais 'faire carrière' (l'enseignement), tout en souhaitant que je pourrais un jour me consacrer à l'écriture. Mon emploi à la Montréal Tramways n'avait en effet constitué qu'un interlude au cours duquel, malheureux et dépressif, je n'avais trouvé d'autres 'remontants' que de scribouiller des vers à l'endos des factures et listes de correspondances de mon employeur. Même si je rêvais sans doute de gloire littéraire dans l'abstrait, j'étais loin de croire ou d'espérer in concreto que mes travaux d'écrivain pourraient m'assurer au soleil une place supra-paternelle. Cette place était pourtant fort humble. J'appartenais à un milieu habitant-ouvrier-petitbourgeois où le salaire et le rang social comptaient beaucoup plus qu'une quelconque (et fumeuse) réussite artistique. Le curieux, c'est que jamais l'idée ne me vint de 'm'élever' en devenant 'professionnel': avocat, notaire, médecin. Quant à l'ingénierie, elle m'était interdite à cause de mon manque de goût et d'aptitude pour les sciences exactes. En 1956 (rédaction de La Bagarre), j'étais au contraire 'établi': je gagnais ma vie, à un salaire minable, il est vrai, qui m'obligeait à donner des cours d'été, mais enfin j'étais indépendant. Quand je me reporte à ma période étatsunienne, je la visionne-fantasme étrangement limbique et floue, comme si j'avais vécu dans l'attente d'un changement ou d'une renaissance. Est-ce un hasard si ledit changement prit la forme d'un retour au pays et se produisit au lendemain de mon retour à l'écriture d'imagination, lequel survint de son côté au lendemain de l'apoplexie paternelle? Je suis convaincu que non. Mais je me réserve de creuser-disséquer plus tard, à psyché reposée, le phénomène. Après des doutes sur la 'genèse paternelle' de La Bagarre - où pourtant le héros sauve de la ruine le substitut paternel Bouboule - Robidoux exprime des doutes chronologiques plus précis sur l'origine de L'Incubation. Toujours fidèle à son axiome voulant que mon essai soit une œuvre d'imagination, Robidoux rappelle - et sur ce point il a raison - que quelques pages de la future Incubation furent rédigées à Paris en 1962. J'étais alors en train de m'échiner à une nouvelle version de La Commensale. Ce travail, qui me pesait de plus en plus, se trouva bientôt ralenti et comme onirisé en raison d'une attaque de mononucléose. Le hasard a voulu (hasard: phénomène dont on n'a pu découvrir les causes) que dans l'élaboration de mon œuvre divers microbes producteurs d'états seconds aient été de précieuses 'sources d'inspiration.' (C'est ainsi que ni Mes romans et moi ni Le Semestre n'eussent sans doute vu le jour sans l'aide des chlamidiae qui, un quart de semestre durant, me gratifièrent d'une fièvre hyperchevaline dont je ne me remis - à coups d'antibiotiques - qu'au bout de six mois.)

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