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Nonfiction

In Praise of the Margins

By Elsa Pépin
Translated from French by Donald Winkler
Elsa Pépin details how Quebec writers have drawn their strength from their minority status.

It’s not easy to paint a faithful picture of a literature in only a few words. And so, rather than presenting a broad overview of the current Quebec literary scene, I propose to bring to your attention a few recent works that embody the unique character of our “small literature”—small in the sense that it exists on the margins of the French language literary capital (Paris), and of North America, whose lingua franca is, of course, English.

After a long period during which, following the example of many other minority literatures, it consolidated its national identity,  Quebec literature has slowly moved away from collective concerns, and opened itself up to the world. What it has produced bears witness to this fact, attentive as it has been to individual lives and to personal views of the world, views with universal implications. In this regard, the introspective narrative has provided rich opportunities for a number of Quebec writers,  including Nelly Arcan, who took her own life in 2009, leaving behind her a singular literary project. Among the few Quebec writers to embrace autobiographical fiction, Arcan sparked a veritable shock wave with the appearance in 2001 of Putain (Seuil) [Whore, Black Cat, 2002, trans. Bruce Benderson], the lyric tale of a high-end prostitute selling her body while at the same time denouncing her own servility, thanks to the lucid distance from her own alienation she was able to achieve. Inspired by personal experience but in no way a confessional account, Putain is a novel of indignity, a long, dizzying, and uncomfortable litany. The spiralling prose with its obsessive recapitulations and repetitions embodies in its circularity the narrator’s inner void. Exploring the limits of decency, Putain holds up a frightening mirror to our corrupt society, in thrall to its obsession with appearances. A candidate for both the Médicis and Femina prizes, Putain was the first installment in a body of work cut short by the premature disappearance of its author following Folle, À ciel ouvert, and Paradis, Clef en main. 

Nadine Bismuth, another author with an interest in introspection, but in this case more with its codes, created a parody of autobiographical fiction in Scrapbook (Boréal, 2004) [Scrapbook, Mcarthur & Co., 2008, trans. Susan Ouriou], after the resounding success of her collection of short stories, Les gens fidèles ne font pas les nouvelles (Boréal, 1999) [Fidelity Doesn’t Make the News, 2008, Mcarthur & Co., trans. Susan Ouriou]. This critique of the intellectual community confirmed that the author was a master of irony and social satire, and confirmed as well that Quebec writing can embrace a variety of creative approaches. An incisive critic of our current mores, Bismuth has a direct narrative style, with lively turns of phrase and a language that makes effective use of current vernacular. She returned to the genre of the cynical and hyper-realistic short story in Êtes vous mariée à un psychopathe (Borèal, 2009) [Are You Married to a Psychopath?, Mcarthur & Co., 2010, trans. Donald Winkler]. These bittersweet satires attest to the waverings of a slice of Montreal society that is adrift, bored, and uncomprehending, leading a life devoid of any solid ideals. The stories capture in a number of vivid snapshots our contemporary neuroses, and are characterized by a caustic psychological realism.

In a more classic vein, Sylvain Trudel contributed to the widening scope of Quebec literature with a first novel,  Le Souffle de l’harmattan (Quinze, 1986), whose protagonist, an adopted child, feels nowhere at  home, and seeks out an island called Exile in order to be reborn. With this tale of rootlessness, Trudel initiated a body of work with universal  resonance, following up his first publication with the novel Du mercure sous la langue (Les Allusifs, 2001) [Mercury Under My Tongue, Soft Skull Press, 2008, trans. Sheila Fischman], and with a small masterpiece of the short story form, La mer de la tranquillité (Les Allusifs, 2006). This collection of small fables, urban tragedies, and grave confessions makes for a series of gripping human portraits, featuring a critique of religion, and accounts of suicides and murders. The characters, touched by grace, but deeply skeptical, share a quest for the sacred and an anguished rapport with the real world. Childhood fears, adolescent angst, and the fatigue of the elderly, are all passengers on this foundering boat. Prey to the fervor of a conscience that is hypersensitive, Trudel’s protagonists seek a space between heaven and earth, and discover a beauty that transcends their pain. Far from being blindly serene, La mer de la tranquillité  galvanizes and inspires us as do great poems, casting a harsh but radiant light on human nature, its transgressions and its self-deceptions. The poet’s penetrating eye awakens us to ourselves, and transcends the suffering and ennui uncovered by Arcan and Bismuth, creating a meeting place for all human solitudes.

A return to the sources of the imagination

Far from this introspective world, some writers have reconnected with the traditional novel, and placed the imagination front and centre. The astonishing tale teller Nicolas Dickner paved the way in 2005 with his fantastical Nikolski (Alto) [Nikolski, Vintage Canada, 2009, trans. Lazer Lederhandler]. Three mysterious narrators, members of the same family who are unaware of their connection, set out in search of their origins. Their migration takes bizarre turns, with troubling symmetry. An ode to adventure brimming over with inventiveness, Nikolski is a rich and erudite work that is unclassifiable, borrowing elements from the detective novel, the adventure novel, and the road novel. Dickner has created a new kind of cartographic fiction where the places and the itineraries define the characters.  Quebec literature has never spread itself abroad so effectively as with this cosmopolitan book, a kaleidoscope of baroque images, a little literary UFO translated into ten languages. There followed Tarmac (2009), a novel set against an apocalyptic background during the fall of the Berlin Wall, when two adolescents huddle in a bungalow they inhabit as though it were a bunker, and live out an unorthodox love story under the growing threat of an atomic attack. On the cusp between realism and the fantastical, with gravity, humor, and fantasy, Dickner is producing a body of work that is imaginative and urbane.

Other Quebec novelists have also participated in this leaning toward dealing with worlds beyond Quebec—geographical, as well as thematic.  Recently, Kim Thuy made headlines with her novel Ru (Libre expression, 2010) [Ru, Random House of Canada, 2011, trans. Sheila Fischman], which traces the memories of a Vietnamese refugee to Canada. In autumn 2010, Perrine Leblanc also surprised with L’Homme blanc (Quartanier, 2010), a novel that follows in the steps of an escapee from the Gulags of the Soviet Union.

But I would draw attention in particular to the work of Dominique Fortier. Inspired by an imagination with no geographical or temporal boundaries, Fortier dared, in her first novel, to take as her subject the last expedition of the Englishman John Franklin, who set out in search of the North-West Passage in 1845. Du bon usage des étoiles (Alto, 2008) [On the Proper Use of Stars, McClelland & Stewart, 2010, trans. Sheila Fischman], follows the adventures of a band of Englishmen who have the arrogance to believe that they can defy nature. Drawing on the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel, Du bon usage des étoiles gives a chorus of voices precedence over intimate narrative. Committed to shedding light on the observable world from different perspectives, Fortier passes from one narrative voice to another, and succeeds masterfully in creating a novel whose language is classic and elegant, and subtly ironic. The pathetic and tragic quest of these nineteenthcentury Victorians holds up a revealing mirror to our own modern pretensions. Fortier’s second novel, Les Larmes de Saint-Laurent, further explores the omniscient novel with three stories that echo each other in a subtle interplay of correspondences. This triptych tells of the lives of Baptiste Cyparis, sole survivor of the eruption of Pelée Mountain in 1902; the mathematician Edward Love, expert on the earth’s crust; and a present-day Montreal woman walking her dogs on the city’s own mountain. Rich in playful and grave images, learned, and sublime in its poetry, Les Larmes de Saint-Laurent confirms the talent and rigor of a young writer building an impressive body of work.

With her strong and independent voice, and an imagination this time oriented toward the psychological adventure, Catherine Mavrikakis, for her part, has made of  autobiographical fiction a tainted narrative that cries out to be reinvented. Mavrikakis burst on the scene with a radical and angry work, deeply imbued with the colors of America, often black, gray, or mauve, like its polluted sky. Le Ciel de Bay City (Héliotrope, 2008), set in Michigan in the 1970s, tells the story of an adolescent girl fixated on death, who seeks a place for herself in the toxic and sterile void that is America, struggling to survive the burden imposed by the memory of her ancestors exterminated in Auschwitz. Ever since Deuils cannibales et mélancoliques (Trois, 1999), [A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning, Coach House Books, 2004, trans. Nathalie Stephens], Mavrikakis has been putting the West, and its morbid and amnesiac rapport with history, on trial. With her incendiary writing style, Mavrikakis creates an uncompromising and poisoned narrative, full of rage.

It brings to mind, in fact, the Louis Hamelin who made his own stunning entry with a novel whose title was, appropriately, La rage (Boréal,1989). Since then, this brilliant stylist has set his sights on the great myth of our modern political history: the October Crisis of 1970, which is at the center of La Constellation du Lynx (Boréal, 2010). This ambitious fresco, somewhere between parody, the crime novel, and the epic tale, at times ironic, at times lyrical, gives voice to multiple versions of the story in a truly polyphonic novel, and constitutes a meditation on history as a fabrication that fiction enables us to deconstruct.  Unsettling, the novel penetrates the shroud of silence that has descended over those dramatic events.

Another trenchant novel is emblematic of Quebec’s burgeoning cultural mix,  and its growing interest in the foreign scene. Parfum de poussière (Alto, 2007), Sophie Voillot’s translation from the English of De Niro’s Game (House of Anansi Press, 2006) by the Lebanese-born Canadian Rawi Hage, paints a devastating picture of the Lebanese civil war. Bassam and George are surviving as best as they can, through smuggling and other illegal scams, in a Beirut under siege. Then their paths diverge. Georges goes back to fighting, while Bassam chooses to flee, but is captured and forced into exile. Starting as a war story, the novel mutates into a lyric narrative shot through with dreams and hallucinations. In a sort of fantastical Iliad, Bassam’s deliriums as he wanders through Paris are an apt reflection of the wanderings of a man stripped of his soul, blinded by the dust of the “ten thousand bombs fallen on the city,” a leitmotif  of the novel that communicates well the profligacy and monotony of all wars. This searing tale shunts back and forth between its flesh-and-blood massacres and the call of a decayed sacredness, scattering to the wind in shards of shadow and light what once was human, what now is ash.

Since the last decade, Quebec writers have drawn their strength from their marginal status, capitalizing on a freedom unavailable to the dominant literatures. In this respect, the Quebec literary milieu owes much to the emergence of young publishing houses that have brought their energy to the world of the book. Les Allusifs, founded by Brigitte Bouchard ten years ago, has put together a catalog consisting almost entirely of foreign translations, and makes half of its sales in France. There followed Le Quartanier, founded in 2002 by Éric de Larochellière and Christian Larouche, at first oriented toward experimental poetry, but now also publishing often-daring nonfiction and fiction, including that of Alain Farah, whose powerful Matamore no. 29 appeared in 2008, and that of the talented Hervé Bouchard. French writers also appear in Le Quartanier’s extremely original catalog, which continues to introduce new and exceptional minds to the Quebec literary scene. Then came Marchand de feuilles, directed by Mélanie Vincelette, nurturing young writers publishing innovative and unusual texts. Antoine Tanguay then founded Alto, which has advanced to the forefront of the publishing scene with its emphasis on  works of the imagination. Finally, Héliotrope, a publishing house for experimental writing, and La Pastèque, specializing in graphic novels, are making their own contribution to the vitality of Quebec literature. While “small” in statistical terms, Quebec literature today is free in spirit and turns its marginality to good account. Its determination to take its place in the world market alongside the dominant literatures has made for a close bond between the members of the Quebec literary community. Banking on its own uniqueness, Quebec literature is moving well beyond its own borders.

Translation of “À la faveur de la marge.” Copyright 2011  by Elsa Pépin. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2011 by Donald Winkler. All rights reserved

English French (Original)

It’s not easy to paint a faithful picture of a literature in only a few words. And so, rather than presenting a broad overview of the current Quebec literary scene, I propose to bring to your attention a few recent works that embody the unique character of our “small literature”—small in the sense that it exists on the margins of the French language literary capital (Paris), and of North America, whose lingua franca is, of course, English.

After a long period during which, following the example of many other minority literatures, it consolidated its national identity,  Quebec literature has slowly moved away from collective concerns, and opened itself up to the world. What it has produced bears witness to this fact, attentive as it has been to individual lives and to personal views of the world, views with universal implications. In this regard, the introspective narrative has provided rich opportunities for a number of Quebec writers,  including Nelly Arcan, who took her own life in 2009, leaving behind her a singular literary project. Among the few Quebec writers to embrace autobiographical fiction, Arcan sparked a veritable shock wave with the appearance in 2001 of Putain (Seuil) [Whore, Black Cat, 2002, trans. Bruce Benderson], the lyric tale of a high-end prostitute selling her body while at the same time denouncing her own servility, thanks to the lucid distance from her own alienation she was able to achieve. Inspired by personal experience but in no way a confessional account, Putain is a novel of indignity, a long, dizzying, and uncomfortable litany. The spiralling prose with its obsessive recapitulations and repetitions embodies in its circularity the narrator’s inner void. Exploring the limits of decency, Putain holds up a frightening mirror to our corrupt society, in thrall to its obsession with appearances. A candidate for both the Médicis and Femina prizes, Putain was the first installment in a body of work cut short by the premature disappearance of its author following Folle, À ciel ouvert, and Paradis, Clef en main. 

Nadine Bismuth, another author with an interest in introspection, but in this case more with its codes, created a parody of autobiographical fiction in Scrapbook (Boréal, 2004) [Scrapbook, Mcarthur & Co., 2008, trans. Susan Ouriou], after the resounding success of her collection of short stories, Les gens fidèles ne font pas les nouvelles (Boréal, 1999) [Fidelity Doesn’t Make the News, 2008, Mcarthur & Co., trans. Susan Ouriou]. This critique of the intellectual community confirmed that the author was a master of irony and social satire, and confirmed as well that Quebec writing can embrace a variety of creative approaches. An incisive critic of our current mores, Bismuth has a direct narrative style, with lively turns of phrase and a language that makes effective use of current vernacular. She returned to the genre of the cynical and hyper-realistic short story in Êtes vous mariée à un psychopathe (Borèal, 2009) [Are You Married to a Psychopath?, Mcarthur & Co., 2010, trans. Donald Winkler]. These bittersweet satires attest to the waverings of a slice of Montreal society that is adrift, bored, and uncomprehending, leading a life devoid of any solid ideals. The stories capture in a number of vivid snapshots our contemporary neuroses, and are characterized by a caustic psychological realism.

In a more classic vein, Sylvain Trudel contributed to the widening scope of Quebec literature with a first novel,  Le Souffle de l’harmattan (Quinze, 1986), whose protagonist, an adopted child, feels nowhere at  home, and seeks out an island called Exile in order to be reborn. With this tale of rootlessness, Trudel initiated a body of work with universal  resonance, following up his first publication with the novel Du mercure sous la langue (Les Allusifs, 2001) [Mercury Under My Tongue, Soft Skull Press, 2008, trans. Sheila Fischman], and with a small masterpiece of the short story form, La mer de la tranquillité (Les Allusifs, 2006). This collection of small fables, urban tragedies, and grave confessions makes for a series of gripping human portraits, featuring a critique of religion, and accounts of suicides and murders. The characters, touched by grace, but deeply skeptical, share a quest for the sacred and an anguished rapport with the real world. Childhood fears, adolescent angst, and the fatigue of the elderly, are all passengers on this foundering boat. Prey to the fervor of a conscience that is hypersensitive, Trudel’s protagonists seek a space between heaven and earth, and discover a beauty that transcends their pain. Far from being blindly serene, La mer de la tranquillité  galvanizes and inspires us as do great poems, casting a harsh but radiant light on human nature, its transgressions and its self-deceptions. The poet’s penetrating eye awakens us to ourselves, and transcends the suffering and ennui uncovered by Arcan and Bismuth, creating a meeting place for all human solitudes.

A return to the sources of the imagination

Far from this introspective world, some writers have reconnected with the traditional novel, and placed the imagination front and centre. The astonishing tale teller Nicolas Dickner paved the way in 2005 with his fantastical Nikolski (Alto) [Nikolski, Vintage Canada, 2009, trans. Lazer Lederhandler]. Three mysterious narrators, members of the same family who are unaware of their connection, set out in search of their origins. Their migration takes bizarre turns, with troubling symmetry. An ode to adventure brimming over with inventiveness, Nikolski is a rich and erudite work that is unclassifiable, borrowing elements from the detective novel, the adventure novel, and the road novel. Dickner has created a new kind of cartographic fiction where the places and the itineraries define the characters.  Quebec literature has never spread itself abroad so effectively as with this cosmopolitan book, a kaleidoscope of baroque images, a little literary UFO translated into ten languages. There followed Tarmac (2009), a novel set against an apocalyptic background during the fall of the Berlin Wall, when two adolescents huddle in a bungalow they inhabit as though it were a bunker, and live out an unorthodox love story under the growing threat of an atomic attack. On the cusp between realism and the fantastical, with gravity, humor, and fantasy, Dickner is producing a body of work that is imaginative and urbane.

Other Quebec novelists have also participated in this leaning toward dealing with worlds beyond Quebec—geographical, as well as thematic.  Recently, Kim Thuy made headlines with her novel Ru (Libre expression, 2010) [Ru, Random House of Canada, 2011, trans. Sheila Fischman], which traces the memories of a Vietnamese refugee to Canada. In autumn 2010, Perrine Leblanc also surprised with L’Homme blanc (Quartanier, 2010), a novel that follows in the steps of an escapee from the Gulags of the Soviet Union.

But I would draw attention in particular to the work of Dominique Fortier. Inspired by an imagination with no geographical or temporal boundaries, Fortier dared, in her first novel, to take as her subject the last expedition of the Englishman John Franklin, who set out in search of the North-West Passage in 1845. Du bon usage des étoiles (Alto, 2008) [On the Proper Use of Stars, McClelland & Stewart, 2010, trans. Sheila Fischman], follows the adventures of a band of Englishmen who have the arrogance to believe that they can defy nature. Drawing on the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel, Du bon usage des étoiles gives a chorus of voices precedence over intimate narrative. Committed to shedding light on the observable world from different perspectives, Fortier passes from one narrative voice to another, and succeeds masterfully in creating a novel whose language is classic and elegant, and subtly ironic. The pathetic and tragic quest of these nineteenthcentury Victorians holds up a revealing mirror to our own modern pretensions. Fortier’s second novel, Les Larmes de Saint-Laurent, further explores the omniscient novel with three stories that echo each other in a subtle interplay of correspondences. This triptych tells of the lives of Baptiste Cyparis, sole survivor of the eruption of Pelée Mountain in 1902; the mathematician Edward Love, expert on the earth’s crust; and a present-day Montreal woman walking her dogs on the city’s own mountain. Rich in playful and grave images, learned, and sublime in its poetry, Les Larmes de Saint-Laurent confirms the talent and rigor of a young writer building an impressive body of work.

With her strong and independent voice, and an imagination this time oriented toward the psychological adventure, Catherine Mavrikakis, for her part, has made of  autobiographical fiction a tainted narrative that cries out to be reinvented. Mavrikakis burst on the scene with a radical and angry work, deeply imbued with the colors of America, often black, gray, or mauve, like its polluted sky. Le Ciel de Bay City (Héliotrope, 2008), set in Michigan in the 1970s, tells the story of an adolescent girl fixated on death, who seeks a place for herself in the toxic and sterile void that is America, struggling to survive the burden imposed by the memory of her ancestors exterminated in Auschwitz. Ever since Deuils cannibales et mélancoliques (Trois, 1999), [A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning, Coach House Books, 2004, trans. Nathalie Stephens], Mavrikakis has been putting the West, and its morbid and amnesiac rapport with history, on trial. With her incendiary writing style, Mavrikakis creates an uncompromising and poisoned narrative, full of rage.

It brings to mind, in fact, the Louis Hamelin who made his own stunning entry with a novel whose title was, appropriately, La rage (Boréal,1989). Since then, this brilliant stylist has set his sights on the great myth of our modern political history: the October Crisis of 1970, which is at the center of La Constellation du Lynx (Boréal, 2010). This ambitious fresco, somewhere between parody, the crime novel, and the epic tale, at times ironic, at times lyrical, gives voice to multiple versions of the story in a truly polyphonic novel, and constitutes a meditation on history as a fabrication that fiction enables us to deconstruct.  Unsettling, the novel penetrates the shroud of silence that has descended over those dramatic events.

Another trenchant novel is emblematic of Quebec’s burgeoning cultural mix,  and its growing interest in the foreign scene. Parfum de poussière (Alto, 2007), Sophie Voillot’s translation from the English of De Niro’s Game (House of Anansi Press, 2006) by the Lebanese-born Canadian Rawi Hage, paints a devastating picture of the Lebanese civil war. Bassam and George are surviving as best as they can, through smuggling and other illegal scams, in a Beirut under siege. Then their paths diverge. Georges goes back to fighting, while Bassam chooses to flee, but is captured and forced into exile. Starting as a war story, the novel mutates into a lyric narrative shot through with dreams and hallucinations. In a sort of fantastical Iliad, Bassam’s deliriums as he wanders through Paris are an apt reflection of the wanderings of a man stripped of his soul, blinded by the dust of the “ten thousand bombs fallen on the city,” a leitmotif  of the novel that communicates well the profligacy and monotony of all wars. This searing tale shunts back and forth between its flesh-and-blood massacres and the call of a decayed sacredness, scattering to the wind in shards of shadow and light what once was human, what now is ash.

Since the last decade, Quebec writers have drawn their strength from their marginal status, capitalizing on a freedom unavailable to the dominant literatures. In this respect, the Quebec literary milieu owes much to the emergence of young publishing houses that have brought their energy to the world of the book. Les Allusifs, founded by Brigitte Bouchard ten years ago, has put together a catalog consisting almost entirely of foreign translations, and makes half of its sales in France. There followed Le Quartanier, founded in 2002 by Éric de Larochellière and Christian Larouche, at first oriented toward experimental poetry, but now also publishing often-daring nonfiction and fiction, including that of Alain Farah, whose powerful Matamore no. 29 appeared in 2008, and that of the talented Hervé Bouchard. French writers also appear in Le Quartanier’s extremely original catalog, which continues to introduce new and exceptional minds to the Quebec literary scene. Then came Marchand de feuilles, directed by Mélanie Vincelette, nurturing young writers publishing innovative and unusual texts. Antoine Tanguay then founded Alto, which has advanced to the forefront of the publishing scene with its emphasis on  works of the imagination. Finally, Héliotrope, a publishing house for experimental writing, and La Pastèque, specializing in graphic novels, are making their own contribution to the vitality of Quebec literature. While “small” in statistical terms, Quebec literature today is free in spirit and turns its marginality to good account. Its determination to take its place in the world market alongside the dominant literatures has made for a close bond between the members of the Quebec literary community. Banking on its own uniqueness, Quebec literature is moving well beyond its own borders.

À la faveur de la marge

C’est une tâche difficile que de faire le portrait fidèle d’une littérature en quelques mots. Ainsi, au lieu d’un regard exhaustif des lettres québécoises actuelles, je propose d’attirer votre attention sur quelques oeuvres récentes qui font la singularité de notre «petite littérature », en ce sens qu’elle vit en marge de la capitale littéraire de la Francophonie (Paris) et de l’Amérique du Nord, dont la lingua franca est bien sûr l’anglais.

Après une longue période où elle s’est faite nationale, à l’instar de plusieurs littératures minoritaires, la littérature québécoise s’est lentement décentrée des idéaux collectifs et ouverte au monde. Les oeuvres en témoignent, attentives aux vies individuelles et aux regards personnels sur le monde auxquels les individusà portée universelle. Le récit introspectif offre à cet égard un espace intéressant pour plusieurs auteurs québécois, dont Nelly Arcan, qui s’est enlevé la vie en 2009, laissant derrière elle un projet littéraire atypique. Parmi les rares auteurs québécois à se réclamer de l’autofiction, Arcan a créé une véritable onde de choc avec la parution en 2001 de Putain (Seuil), la triste incantation d’une prostituée de luxe vendant son corps tout en condamnant sa propre servilité grâce au décalage de sa lucidité. Inspirée de son expérience mais n’ayant rien à voir avec le témoignage, Putain est un roman de l’indignité, une longue litanie étourdissante et inconfortable. La prose en spirale avec ses retours obsessionnels et ses redites mime par sa circularité le vide intérieur de la narratrice. Jouant avec les limites de l’impudeur, Putain tend un miroir effrayant de notre société corrompue, tyrannisée par l’obsession de l’image. En lice pour les prix Médicis et Femina, Putain fut le premier jalon d’une oeuvre avortée par la disparition précoce de l’auteure, après Folle, À ciel ouvert et Paradis, Clef en main.

Autre auteure intéressée par le genre introspectif, mais jouant cette fois avec ses codes, Nadine Bismuth a créé une parodie d’autofiction dans Scrapbook, après le succès retentissant de son recueil de nouvelles Les Gens fidèles ne font pas les nouvelles (Boréal, 1999). Après le succès retentissant de son recueil de nouvelles Les Gens fidèles ne font pas les nouvelles (Boréal, 1999), Nadine Bismuth a pour sa part créé une savante parodie d’autofiction dans Scrapbook (Boréal, 2004). Cette critique des milieux intellectuels inscrit l’auteure comme maître de l’ironie et de la satire sociale. Critique percutante de nos moeurs, Bismuth utilise le ton direct, les formules-chocs et une langue aux accents contemporains. Elle revient au genre de la nouvelle cynique et hyper-réaliste avec Êtes-vous mariée à un psychopathe (Boréal, 2009). Efficaces, ces satires douces-amères témoignent du vacillement d’une faune montréalaise plongée dans l’ennui et l’incompréhension d’une existence vidée de grands idéaux. Ces histoires saisissent en un franc coup d’œil quelques clichés forts de nos névroses modernes et s’avèrent d’un réalisme psychologique décapant.

Dans une tonalité plus classique, Sylvain Trudel  contribue au décentrement de la littérature québécoise avec un premier roman, Le Souffle de l’harmattan, où il invente un héros enfant adopté qui ne se sent nulle part chez lui et cherche une île appelée Exil pour renaître. Avec cette fable du déracinement, Trudel amorce une œuvre à la portée universelle, poursuivie avec un petit chef d’œuvre du genre de la nouvelle: La mer de la tranquillité (Les Allusifs, 2006). D’abord remarqué pour Le Souffle de l’harmattan (Quinze, 1986) etDu mercure sous la langue (Les Allusifs, 2001), Trudel revient en force avec ce recueil de petites fables, tragédies urbaines ou graves confessions qui forment une série de portraits saisissants de la nature humaine, marqués par une critique de la religion, des histoires de suicides et de meurtres. Ses personnages touchés par la grâce mais profondément sceptiques se rejoignent dans leur quête de sacré et leur face-à-face avec la réalité. Les peurs de l’enfance côtoient les angoisses de l’adolescence et la fatigue des vieux, à bord d’un même bateau chancelant. En proie à la violence d’une conscience trop aiguisée, l’homme chez Trudel cherche un espace entre ciel et terre et découvre une beauté qui transcende la douleur. Loin d’une quiétude aveugle, La mer de la tranquillité foudroie et inspire à la manière des grands poèmes, jetant un éclairage brutal mais lumineux sur la nature humaine, unie dans l’horreur comme dans ses leurres.  L’œil fulgurant du poète éclaire ainsi nos dormances et transcende la souffrance et l’ennui révélées chez Arcan et Bismuth par une rencontre bouleversante de toutes les solitudes humaines.

Retour aux sources de l’imaginaire

Loin du courantintrospectif, quelques auteurs ont renoué avec le roman traditionnel et remis à l’avant-plan l’imaginaire. L’étonnant fabuliste Nicolas Dickner a ouvert le bal en 2005 avec son fantasmagorique Nikolski (Alto). Trois mystérieux narrateurs, membres d’une même famille mais ignorant leur lien, partent en quête de leurs origines. Leur migration emprunte d’étonnantes trajectoires à la symétrie troublante. Ode au voyage à l’imaginaire débridé, Nikolski est une oeuvre érudite et foisonnante qui échappe aux genres et emprunte des éléments du roman policier, d’aventures et du road novel. Dickner crée un nouveau roman cartographique où les lieux et les parcours définissent les personnages. La littérature québécoise ne s’est jamais si bien exportée qu’avec ce roman cosmopolite, kaléidoscope d’images baroques, petit ovni littéraire traduit en dix langues. Suivra Tarmac (Alto, 2009), un roman sur fond d’apocalypse à l’époque de la chute du mur de Berlin où deux adolescents tapis dans un bungalow habité comme un bunker vivent un amour atypique sous la menace grandissante d’une attaque atomique. À cheval entre le réalisme et le fantastique, avec gravité, humour et fantaisie, Dickner poursuit une oeuvre imaginative et cosmopolite.

D’autres romanciers québécois s’inscrivent dans cette mouvance des réalités hors Québec. Tout récemment, Kim Thuy a fait les manchettes avec son roman Ru (Libre expression, 2010), qui relate les souvenirs d’une réfugiée vietnamienne au Canada. À l’automne 2010, Perrine Leblanc a aussi surpris avec L’Homme blanc (Quartanier, 2010), un roman qui suit un rescapé des goulags de l’Union soviétique.

Mais c’est vers l’oeuvre de Dominique Fortier que j’attire votre attention. Nourrie à un imaginaire sans bornes géographiques ni temporelles, Fortier a pris le beau risque de s’inspirer pour son premier roman de la dernière expédition du Britannique John Franklin, parti à la conquête du passage du Nord-Ouest en 1845. Du bon usage des étoiles (Alto, 2008)suit l’aventure menée par une bande d’Anglais qui ont l’arrogance de penser pouvoir défier la nature. Hérité de la tradition du roman du XIXe siècle, Du bon usage des étoiles préfère au récit intime le dialogue des voix. Fidèle au parti pris de faire du roman un observatoire du monde éclairé par différentes perspectives, Fortier mêle les narrations et réussit d’une main de maître à créer un roman à la langue classique et élégante, teintée d’une fine ironie. La quête parodique et tragique de ses Victoriens du XIXe siècle nous renvoient un miroir révélateur de nos vanités modernes.Son second roman, Les Larmes de Saint-Laurent, poursuit dans la lignée du roman omniscient avec trois histoires qui se font écho par un jeu subtil de correspondances. Ce triptyque raconte les vies de Baptiste Cyparis, seul survivant de l’éruption de la montagne Pelée en 1902; du mathématicien britannique Edward Love, spécialiste de la croûte terrestre, et d’une promeneuse de chiens montréalaise vivant à notre époque. Truffé d’images ludiques ou graves, d’une grande érudition et d’une poésie sublime, Les Larmes de Saint-Laurent confirme le talent et la rigueur d’une jeune écrivain qui construit une oeuvre d’envergure.

Voix forte et anticonformiste, Catherine Mavrikakis a pour sa part fait de l’autofiction un récit empoisonné qu’il faut réinventer, et ce grâce à un imaginaire axé sur l’aventure psychologique cette fois. Mavrikakis perce le paysage avec une oeuvre radicale et indignée, profondément inscrite dans les couleurs de l’Amérique, souvent noire, grise ou mauve, comme son ciel pollué. Le Ciel de Bay City(Héliotrope, 2008) raconte la jeunesse au Michigan dans les années 1970 d’une adolescente aux pulsions de mort qui cherche sa place dans le vide toxique et infécond de l’Amérique, luttant pour survivre avec le fardeau de la mémoire de ses ancêtres exterminés à Auschwitz. Mavrikakis poursuit depuis Deuils cannibales et mélancoliques (Trois, 1999) un procès contre l’Occident et sa cohabitation morbide et amnésique avec l’Histoire. Dans un style incendiaire, Mavrikakis crée un récit empoisonné sans compromis, plein d’une rage qui n’est pas sans rappeler celle d’un Louis Hamelin qui fit justement une entrée fracassante avec un roman intitulé La rage (Boréal, 1989). Depuis, ce prosateur brillant s’est attaqué au plus grand mythe de notre histoire politique contemporaine : la crise d’Octobre 1970, au centre de La Constellation du Lynx (Boréal, 2010). Cette fresque ambitieuse entre la parodie, le polar et le récit épique, tantôt ironique, tantôt lyrique, fait entendre les multiples versions de l’histoire en un vrai roman polyphonique et développe une réflexion sur l’histoire comme fabrication que la fiction permet de déconstruire. Dérangeant, le roman perce la chape de silence tombée sur ces tragiques événements.

Signe du métissage de la culture québécoise et de l’intérêt grandissant pour des réalités étrangères, une autre œuvre percutante, Parfum de poussière (traduction par Sophie Voillot de De Niro’s Game, Alto, 2007) du Canadien d’origine libanaise Rawi Hage offre un portrait fracassé du carnage de la guerre civile libanaise. Bassam et Georges survivent tant bien que mal dans Beyrouth assiégée de contrebande et autres magouilles illégales. Puis, leur route se sépare, Georges rejoint l’effort de guerre, alors que Bassam préfère la fuite, mais sera capturé puis poussé à l’exil. De la chronique de guerre, le récit bifurque vers un chant contaminé par le rêve et l’hallucination. Sorte d’Iliade fantasmée, les délires de Bassam déambulant dans Paris expriment avec justesse l’errance de l’homme dépouillé de son âme, aveuglé par la poussière des « dix mille bombes tombées sur la ville », leitmotiv du roman qui traduit la démesure et l’indifférenciation des guerres. Ce récit fulgurant se promène entre le concret des massacres et l’appel d’un sacré dissolu, disséminant en parcelles d’ombre et de lumière l’humanité réduite en cendres.

Depuis la dernière décennie, les écrivains québécois ont puisé leur force de leur existence en marge, profitant d’une liberté moins accessible pour les littératures dominantes. À cet égard, le milieu littéraire québécois doit beaucoup à l’émergence de jeunes maisons d’édition qui ont dynamiser la scène du livre. Les Allusifs, fondé par Brigitte Bouchard il y a dix ans, a créé un catalogue presque exclusivement constitué de traductions étrangères qui fait la moitié de ses ventes en France. Ont suivis le Marchand de feuilles, dirigé par Mélanie Vincelette, incubateur de jeunes auteurs qui publie des textes novateurs et insolites. Antoine Tanguay a ensuite fondé Alto qui s’est projeté à l’avant-plan de la scène éditoriale en accordant une place importante aux littératures de l’imaginaire. Finalement, Héliotrope, une maison d’édition qui publie des textes expérimentaux, créé par Florence Noyer en 2007, et La Pastèque, spécialisée en romans graphiques et en bandes dessinées, contribuent à la vitalité des lettres québécoises. Condamnée par le nombre à être « petite », la littérature québécoise actuelle est autonome et tire parti de sa marginalité. La volonté de faire sa place sur le marché mondial au même titre que les littératures dominantes  tisse de forts liens entre les membres du milieu du livre québécois. Misant sur sa singularité, la littérature québécoise  rayonne hors de ses frontières.

Copyright  Elsa Pépin

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