firmly in the city. Dreams of Arcadia can still persist, but as dreams, not as recipes. When, in Roy's subsequent Alexandre Chenevert (1954; The Cashier, 1955), Alexandre at one point imagines living in the country, he does so as one measure of the -569- many limitations of his city life, not as the author's career advice to bank clerks.
Urbanization and industrialization led, as feared, to a deemphasizing of religion. One sign of this change was the precipitous decline of the provincial birthrate, which went, following World War II, from one of the highest to one of the lowest in the world. Another sign was the increasingly anticlerical tone of much of the fiction. In Gerard Bessette's Le Libraire (1960; Not for Every Eye, 1977), for example, a Bartleby of a book clerk prefers nor to sell (discreetly and for a high price, of course) works on the Index. The hypocrisy of both the book and the religion business justifies the clerk's final theft of the texts in question and his selling them cheaply on a more open — and honest — market.
Other changes also followed the move from the family farm to the nation's factories. One does not work in the latter in the same way and to the same end as on the former, especially during a depression. The consideration that the Great Depression was not countered in Canada by any government measures such as the New Deal prompted French Canadians to begin asking just what kind of deal they were getting from their national government and whether a number of contracts did not require negotiation. World War II and Canada's reluctance to come to the aid of France as opposed to how much the country was willing to sacrifice for the sake of England furthered this process that culminated in the 'Quiet Revolution,' the radical shift in Quebec values witnessed after the war.
The Quiet Revolution was accompanied by a not-so-quiet literary revolution. As in the nineteenth century, literature was deemed a force of paramount social significance. Fiction could both express and create the new identities, individual and collective, that were coming into being. Thus Jacques Ferron advocates and allegorizes Quebec's need for political independence in La Nuit (1965; Quince Jam, 1977), an account of an ordinary man mysteriously called from slumber to a night of portentous violence. Still more explicitly, Jacques Godbout's Le Couteau sur la table (1965; The Knife on the Table, 1968) conjoins the violence of World War II with the first bombs of the FLQ (Front de Libération du Québec), and the knife of the title is finally raised against the Québécois narrator's former English Canadian mistress, Patricia, and the rule of her people. Or in -570- another novel from the same year, Hubert Aquin's Prochain épisode (1965; English translation, 1972), the author, arrested as a suspected terrorist, creates a narrator similarly arrested who, to pass the time while he is incarcerated and to hold suicide at bay, sets out to write a novel that is itself another doubled and displaced version of the author's/narrator's predicament. The result is an intricately crafted parable of revolution both demanded and deferred as well as an early expression of Aquin's genius for ambivalence and angst. And as Aquin's first novel also illustrates, in much of this fiction of rebellion, form, too, is revolutionized. Linear narratives charting a way to some rural Bildungsroman fulfillment are replaced by inventive and experimental fictions (often metafictions) celebrating breaks, bits and pieces, fits and starts. Literary effect is also fractured. For example, in Roch Carrier's La guerre, Yes Sir! (1968; English translation, 1970) when a young man cuts off his hand to avoid being drafted into a war that seems to have little to do with him, we have a telling example of how a Québécois must mutilate himself in order to maintain his own identity, but when the dismembered part is subsequently used as a hockey puck, political parable suddenly shifts to total black humor farce.
Another feature of recent Québécois fiction is the use of joaul, a French dialect that takes its name from its pronunciation of cheval (horse). This dialect was spoken in rural Quebec but more and more became in modified form (incorporating Anglicisms and English words) the language of the lower classes in Montreal. It was also long regarded as proof of second-class status and as quite unsuitable for any literary purpose other than marking such status. But starting with Jacques Renaud's Le cassé (1964) and Claude Jasmin's Pleure pas, Germaine (1965), novelists exploited the literary possibilities of joaul (its different pronunciation, fractured syntax, graphic obscenities) and made it, appropriately, the main vehicle for explorations of alienated proletarian life. One of the best of these novels is Godbout's Salut Galarneau! (1967; Hail Galarneau!, 1970), the 'memoirs and reflections' of a hot-dog vendor rendered in a joaul of Rabelaisian verve. Marie-Claire Blais's Un Joualonais, sa Joualonie (1973; St. Lawrence Blues, 1974) soon parodies the excessive and inauthentic use of joaul (intellectuals discuss language while workers die), but its literary credentials had already been fully established. -571-
The literary credentials of French Canadian fiction are also, by this time, fully established thanks to the writers already noted (or to be noted) and many others, only some of whom I will here name: Yves Beauchemin, Jacques Benoit, Monique Bosco, Réjean Ducharme, Diane Giquère, Suzanne Paradis, Jacques Poulin, Michel Tremblay. And I use the adjective French Canadian rather than Québécois because two of Canada's major Francophone writers come from outside Quebec. Gabrielle Roy was born and raised in Manitoba and sets some of her fiction there, for example, La Petite Pouled'eau (1950; Where Nests the Water Hen, 1970), a poetic account of the small heroisms whereby a French family survives in the isolated north of that province. Antonine Maillet is Acadian and writes of the French in or scattered from the Maritime settlements, as with Pélagie-La-Charrett (1979; Pelagie, 1982), probably her best novel and a mythic account of an indomitable late eighteenth-century Acadian woman gathering together a group of her people in the southern United States and conducting them, 'by the back door,' to history, story, and home — in short, back to Nova Scotia, which was, we tend to forget, also New France.
That conjunction of Nova Scotia and New France suggests a large question about the novels hitherto discussed. How do the English fictions and the French interrelate? Do we see mostly accidental resemblances (the result of two European traditions being transplanted to and developing in roughly the same broad expanse of northern North America over the same historical period) or the expression of some larger unity (the ways shared geography and shared history have shaped literature)? By and large, English critics (such as Ronald Sutherland in Second Image) have argued the latter, and French critics (for example, Jean-Charles Falardeau in Notre société et son roman) have assumed the former, thereby replicating the different way Canadians and Americans tend to view one another across the 49th parallel, one asserting essential difference and the other largely denying it.
In All the Polarities, an aptly titled comparison of the English Canadian novel and le roman québécois, Philip Stratford maintains that differences still outweigh similarities. He sees the English novel as grounded in historical realism and the documentation of both place and protagonist and as inviting moral evaluation more than -572- psychological understanding, whereas le roman québécois is little concerned with particulars of time and place or the minutiae of individual lives but instead sets forth a highly symbolic rendering of the protagonist's psyche in both its conscious and subconscious manifestations and invites the reader to share in that experience rather than to judge it. Stratford thereby suggests that the comparison provided over a century ago by Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau, an early novelist who was also Quebec's first prime minister, still holds true. Chauveau argued that the two literatures resembled the famous double-spiral staircase of the Château de Chambord, a staircase that two people could climb without meeting until they reached the top. Except, of course, that fictional traditions, as opposed to staircases, have no tops, just as they can also twine together in more complicated forms than the double spiral.
As Barbara Godard, in 'The Discourse of the Other: Canadian Literature and the Question of Ethnicity,' has recently emphasized, 'definitions of Canadian literature have developed on a binary model,' and that model of an English-French interface 'mirroring the official bilingual policy of the country…has precluded the discussion of writing by ethnic writers.' The hyphen separating French or English from Canada situates each literature as a dislocation, a writing into being of difference. But, Godard continues, 'what began as a thematic representation of difference in the nineteenth century, a difference between Quebec and Canadian literatures and those of the mother countries, has become in contemporary Canadian and Quebec literatures, a difference within, linguistically inscribed.' In short, it is easy to stay on that double-spiraled staircase, caught in what E. D. Blodgett has termed 'the bind of binarism.' It is easy, too, not to see how much this metaphor of double defining differences precludes noticing still other differences. Is there, for example, an Icelandic or, say, a West Indian turn anywhere in all that twisting? And do not Native people have anything to say of, to, or in the literary
