From myth to reality
Vinland, Norembergue, Kanata, Acadia, New World, New France... how many names was Canada called before it became what we know today, how many myths does it echo, how many dreams does it correspond to? It first appears in the Icelandic Sagas, a body of literature that blends legend and fact, and recalls that the first European (although others undoubtedly preceded him) to set foot on the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence beyond Greenland was a Viking, Leif Erikson. Although this first expedition, around the year 1000, was recounted in The Saga of Erik the Red and The Saga of the Greenlanders, written two centuries later, and archaeological digs have confirmed a Viking presence (which does not seem to have been sustained, perhaps due to conflicts with the natives), it remains difficult to specify to which territory exactly the Vinland evoked corresponded. It's just as difficult to assess whether Norembergue, which appears on the first maps of North America, is myth or reality. In any case, this ghost country echoes Irish tradition, which has it that Brendan, a 6th-century saint, crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a "currach", a light boat manoeuvred with oars, as explorer Tim Severin set out to prove when he succeeded in reproducing the voyage and landing in Newfoundland in 1976. The porous boundary between fiction and historical truth only grew stronger, as new myths were added to the old ones in an attempt to prove that Christopher Columbus was not behind the discovery of this New World that was already fuelling all manner of fantasies. Think of Ontario's Madoc Township, which takes its name from a Welsh prince - whose very existence is not proven - who is said to have conquered it as early as 1170, taking the time to initiate members of the Tuscarora First Nation into the mysteries of its language. Last but not least, we must mention the culture of the aboriginal peoples who, although they had no writing system (but many idioms), were nonetheless rich in beliefs (akin to animism) and legends that have been preserved thanks to oral tradition.
It's easy to imagine that the first navigators to explore the Canadian coast had in mind all these images of a land of milk and honey, but colonization proved to be perilous. Although literature was certainly not the major preoccupation at the time, this does not mean that we should overlook the interest of the writings of the time, from the Relations of Jacques Cartier (who, it is said, gave his name to the country after the Iroquois word "kanata" meaning "village") to Des Sauvages by Samuel de Champlain, who founded the city of Québec in 1608. The following century was no picnic either: the Seven Years' War pitted the French against the English, resulting in the 1763 Treaty of Paris on this side of the Atlantic, in which the former ceded Canada to the latter. From this long, troubled period, it is nevertheless interesting to note the extensive correspondence of Marie de l'Incarnation, an Ursuline who left Tours for Quebec in 1639. Initially thwarted in her vocation, the missionary became a mother, and it was to her son Claude, who remained on the Old Continent, that she recounted her experiences, until his death in 1672. Encounters with native peoples also inspired chronicles: the work of anthropologist Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce (1666-1716) caused a sensation in the 18th century, rivaling that of historian Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix (1682-1761). Last but not least, the famous Louis-Antoine de Bougainville took part in the War of Conquest against New England, and even though, as a bilingual, he unfortunately had to negotiate his country's surrender, these episodes figure prominently in his Memoirs.
While the French literature resists..
The British regime then tried, unsuccessfully, to assimilate the Franco-Catholic settlers. This was only the first stage in the establishment of a fragile balance that, over the years, would see two languages, two cultures and two religions living side by side. Beyond the political aspect and its many twists and turns, it's the French language of Quebec that's at stake, both in terms of the threats it will face, and in terms of its specificity, which will evolve far from Parisian influence. It was a struggle that took on patriotic overtones in the 19th century, beginning with a publication that is usually remembered as the first French-Canadian novel: L'Influence d'un livre, by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé fils (1814-1841), published in 1837 and republished in 1864, after a few cuts, by Henri-Raymond Casgrain under the title Le Chercheur de trésors. Our good censor, who was also a man of the cloth, did much to safeguard Canadian literature, and was a pioneer in the critical approach to it. His meeting with Octave Crémazie (1827-1879), "Quebec's first national poet", who was also a bookseller, was decisive and led to the creation of L'École littéraire (or patriotique) de Québec. This rather Romantic, Catholic-influenced movement rallied around two publications: Les Soirées canadiennes, created in 1861, and Le Foyer canadien, in 1863. Prominent members of this cenacle included Antoine Gérin-Lajoie (1824-1882), who penned the novel Jean Rivard and the song Un Canadien errant, and Hubert LaRue (1833-1881), a physician who also wrote for other magazines, although Abbé Casgrain never minimized the influence of their elder brother François-Xavier Garneau (1809-1866), famous for his classic L'Histoire du Canada , whose biography he later wrote. Henri-Raymond Casgrain then devoted himself to travel, some of his works were awarded prizes by the Académie française, and he died at the same time as the new century was being born, in 1904, in Quebec City, leaving behind him the image of an important literary activist.
Fortunately, the flame didn't have time to die out, as it was already being fed by L'École littéraire de Montréal. On the initiative of poet Jean Charbonneau and his writer acolyte Paul de Martigny, the first session was held on November 7, 1895. Germain Beaulieu was president, and Louvigny de Montigny helped out. The "exotists" drew their inspiration from elsewhere, benefiting from influences as diverse as Symbolism and the French Parnassians. In 1897, the circle welcomed a very young man, Émile Nelligan, a dazzling comet who lit up Quebec poetry. This ardent admirer of Baudelaire, an absolute romantic in all his themes, from childhood nostalgia to feminine beauty, drew the admiration of all with his declamation of La Romance du vin (The Romance of Wine) on May 26, 1899, but this was to be his swan song, for shortly afterwards, when he was not yet 20, he was committed for mental disorders and remained locked up until his last breath in 1941. His friend Louis Dantin (1865-1945) collected his writings and had them published in 1903, beginning his preface with the terrible words "Émile Nelligan est mort" (Émile Nelligan is dead), foreshadowing that divine inspiration had finally dried up.
The École littéraire de Montréal, for its part, published Les Soirées du château de Ramezay in 1900, a collective work that gave an account of the conferences held up to that point, then seemed to fall into a certain lethargy from which it only really emerged in 1909, with the launch of a new magazine, Terroir. The magazine's relative success can perhaps be explained by an editorial line that strayed too far from the association's original aims, but at the same time failed to convince the enthusiasts of a current that was then becoming predominant, that of the "terroirists". Regionalist literature had been around since the mid-nineteenth century, but the movement gained momentum in the early twentieth with the creation of the Société du parler français au Canada, spearheaded by two Laval University professors, Adjutor Rivard and Stanislas-Alfred Lortie. At the same time, clergyman and future rector Camille Roy had begun work on a textbook of French-Canadian literature, the first version of which, published in 1907, met with immediate success. The stakes were twofold: to assert the originality of the Québécois language, in detachment from and even opposition to French from France, and to extol traditional values such as the land, the family and religion. The most telling example is Maria Chapdelaine, written in 1913 by an exiled Brest native, Louis Hémon.
... English literature tries to exist
Until the 19th century, English-language literature followed more or less the same path as that of the French: explorers' tales, settlers' chronicles, poetry and novels. Englishwoman Frances Brooke earned the title of first Canadian novelist with The History of Emily Montague, a novel inspired by her five-year stay in Quebec, while Samuel Hearne enthralled the crowds with Le Piéton du Grand Nord : première traversée de la toundra canadienne 1769-1772 (éditions Payot). David Thompson (1770-1857) captivated them with his surveying and topographical work. We might also mention Susanna Moodie (1803-1885), famous for her account of settling in an Ontario colony, where she made no secret of her difficulty in acclimatizing and her fascination with the native traditions she documented. Her two best-selling titles - Roughing in the Bush (1852) and Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (1853) - have not been translated into our language, but Margaret Atwood's poetic evocation of her life is at least available in bilingual form from Doucey éditeur. The mid-century period was also marked by a long epic poem dedicated by the American Henry Longfellow (1807-1882) to the memory of the Acadians and their deportation during the Great Upheaval. A symbol of this tragic historical episode, Evangeline (published by Guérin) is also a magnificent love story, one that will never be forgotten. Acadia still rhymes with poetry in the work of William Bliss Carman, who praised the wide-open spaces and magnificence of the province of New Brunswick where he was born in 1861. Along with three other of his peers - Charles GD Roberts (1860-1943), Archibald Lampman (1861-1899) and Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947) - he formed the quartet known as the Confederation Poets, whose double commonality was to use the stylistic codes of the Victorian tradition while drawing inspiration from the natural world around them. Carman's cousin, Charles GD Roberts, nicknamed "the father of Canadian poetry" despite the variable quality of his verse, published several collections(Songs of the Common Day, The Vagrant of Time...) as well as stories told from the point of view of animals. Lampman, whose reputation remains intact, absorbed himself in melancholy meditations, contrasting the calm of country life with the hustle and bustle of big cities(The City of the End of Things, Lyrics of Earth, A Gift of the Sun). Scott also published eight books of poetry(The Magic House and Other Poems, Beauty and Life, The Green Cloister...), as well as collections of short portraits(In the Village of Viger, The Witching of Elspie, The Circle of Affection). Although they were the first incarnation of a purely Canadian literary circle, these poets claimed to be cosmopolitan. Some of them - and others affiliated with them - chose to leave their homeland and settle in the U.S. Conversely, some Englishmen continued to cross the ocean, like Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), the famous humorist whose novels can still be enjoyed at Wombat(Au pays des riches oisifs: aventures en Arcadie, L'Île de la tentation et autres naufrages amoureux, Bienvenue à Mariposa). These exchanges and migrations were perhaps a sign of the difficulty that English-language Canadian literature encountered in finding its place, between the weight of British tradition and that of American influence.
And yet, in the end, Canadian authors were able to make a name for themselves internationally, while continuing to write in their homeland. In 1905, for example, Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) based her story on a news item about a couple who wanted to adopt a boy to help on the farm, only to see a little girl with flamboyant red hair arrive. Three years later, with the manuscript finally accepted, the heroine, Anne Shirley, became such a crowd-pleaser that 60 million copies of the series of novels devoted to her have since been sold worldwide. French publisher Monsieur Toussaint Louverture re-translated them and republished them in a magnificent boxed set in 2020, with the same success. In the same vein, Mazo de la Roche, born in Newmarket in 1879, devoted herself to a saga set in Jalna, the manor house from which she takes her name. In sixteen novels (reissued in 2023 by J'ai Lu), and as many bestsellers, she imagined the adventures of a family, the Whiteoaks, over several generations. She died in Toronto in 1961, and her body now lies beside that of Stephen Leacock at Sibbald Point, Ontario. Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948) wrote books about the pioneers of the Canadian West. Through his work - including Fruits of the Earth, his most famous novel - he initiated the realist movement, which Martin Allerdale Grainger (1874-1941) embraced with Woodsmen of the West, and to which Hugh MacLennan (1907-1990) added a contemporary touch in Two Solitudes (1945), highlighting the conflicting relations between French and English speakers.
A double literature freed
Paradoxically, this work - and perhaps even more so Hugh MacLennan's earlier Barometer Rising(Le Temps tournera au beau, 1941) - appeared at a pivotal time for Canadian literature (in both languages), as it succeeded in freeing itself, at last, from too much formalism. It asserted its specificity, the question of "Québécisms" (which also arose in English) being only the most visible part of this small revolution. Stylistically, this was particularly evident in English-language theater, with the radio plays of Merrill Denison (1893-1975), for example, or the work of the theorist Robertson Davies, who took a step back from his London experiences(Shakespeare for Young Players) to produce an original work(Eros at Breakfast, Fortune, My Foe, At My Heart's Core). On the Francophone side, apart from the exuberant Abraham Moses Klein (1909-1972), who could boast of his ability to make words sound and syntax turn upside down, all with a ferocious sense of humor(La Chaise berçante published by Noroît, Le Second rouleau published by Boréal), the group of "automatistes" led by Paul-Émile Borduas agitated the 1940s. The artists around him - from fields as diverse as photography, dance, design and, of course, literature - published their manifesto Refus Global on August 9, 1948. In it, they called for the rejection of immobilism and for radical artistic and social openness. The reception was frosty, and some of the signatories had no choice but to go into exile, but the worm was in the fruit, and in the early 1960s, the Quiet Revolution took shape, a real period of rupture that proved conducive to the emergence of a more realistic and assertive style of writing. Gaston Miron (1928-1996) renounced his religious vocation to devote himself to poetry, co-founding L'Hexagone, the first publishing house devoted to this art, in 1953, and later becoming politically active. His remarkable dedication to his art and his work as a writer earned him a state funeral. His best-known work is L'Homme repaillé (éditions Typo), published in 1970, a major work of Quebec literature.
New writers flourished, and a number of names became established. In 1966, the discreet Réjean Ducharme published L'Avalée des avalés with Gallimard, his manuscript having failed to find a buyer in Quebec. He was nominated for the Goncourt and won the Governor General's Award for a book so dark and original that it once again achieved cult status. In the same year, a Quebec woman won the prestigious Prix Médicis: Marie-Claire Blais (1939-2021) with Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel, a grand fresco about a family of 16 children! While the deviant behavior of some of these characters may have caused offence at the time of publication, this work remains important for its accurate depiction of the transition between conservative values and progressive ideas.1967 also saw Gabrielle Roy awarded the title of Companion of the Order of Canada, a further accolade for a woman who had already been honored with many distinctions. An important figure in Franco-Manitoban literature, the author died in 1983 in Quebec City, leaving her public with short stories, poems and tales to discover, or rediscover, such as Bonheur d'occasion, La Montagne secrète and La Rivière sans repos. Finally, it's impossible to talk about Quebec literature without mentioning "national writer" Michel Tremblay. Tremblay entered the world of literature through the theater, with some trepidation considering the scandal caused by Les Belles-Sœurs, first performed in 1968. In 1978, with La Grosse femme d'à côté est enceinte, he began the cycle of Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal, and never ceased to publish novels that combine tenderness, humor, critical vision and an appreciation of "joual", that famous popular Canadian French.
English-speakers need not be ashamed of the comparison, thanks to Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) - abundantly translated by Alto in Quebec(Une Maison dans les nuages, L'Ange de pierre, Ta Maison est en feu...), Joëlle Losfeld in France(Un Oiseau dans la maison, Les Devins, Les Habitants du feu...). Once again, it was a woman who strengthened the edifice by venturing into a dystopia that questioned society so well. With The Scarlet Handmaid - winner of the 1985 Governor General's Award - Margaret Atwood (born 1939 in Ottawa) earned her reputation as a leading exponent of contemporary Canadian literature, a status she shared with Michael Ondaatje (born 1943 in Sri Lanka, Canadian citizen since 1965), whose novel The English Patient (Points) was adapted for the screen, and now with a new generation of prolific writers including Jane Urquhart(Niagara, Ciel Changeant..) and Bombay-born Rohinton Mistry(Un si long voyage, L'Équilibre du monde, Une simple affaire de famille...).
Quebec literature, too, continues to expand and open up to other cultures with the emergence of "migrant writing", thanks in particular to the brilliant voices of Kim Thuy, Dany Laferrière and Wadji Mouawad. Today, its resonance is international, and successes are multiplying, from Jean-François Beauchemin's Jour des Corneilles, Prix France-Québec 2004, to Éric Plamondon's Taqawan (Quidam), which received the same award in 2018. Quebec publishing houses (La Peuplade, Mémoire d'encrier, Les 400 coups, Le Quartanier, Alire, etc.) are finding their way onto French bookstore shelves, offering strong, innovative texts for discovery, and in the face of such a richness of language, few French publishers still question the place of birth of the authors who submit manuscripts to them. Our common language, beautiful in its differences, has managed to ignore borders.
