Le XIXe siècle fantastique en Amérique
française
(Fantasy Literature in Nineteenth-century French-speaking America)
(Fantasy Literature in Nineteenth-century French-speaking America)
Claude Janelle et al.
(Excerpt, p. 3-7)
Foreword
"You could say that, in general, our traditional folk tales are diableries (devil stories),
not nasty at all, but on the contrary domesticated to the service of God,
as evidenced by the big black horse that helps the parishioners build their church."
Jacques Ferron,
Du fond de mon arrière-cuisineFor twenty years we have been passionately studying science fiction and fantasy stories published in Quebec. It was inevitable that one day the 19th century would pique our curiosity. When I say "we," I am speaking for myself, of course, but also for my colleagues, Jean Pettigrew, Michel Lord, Daniel Sernine, Rita Painchaud, Thierry Vincent and Norbert Spehner, who agreed to collaborate with me on this project. Since 1987, the idea grew of defining the corpus of fantasy in the Quebec literature of the 19th century. The problem was finding the time to do this work, which would often involve extensive, difficult research, while at the same time we had to keep up with current publications. That is how it can take some books more than a decade before they are published...
Before looking at the corpus of tales studied in Le XIXe siècle fantastique en Amérique française, it might be useful to explain the choices that such an analysis forced us to make in the course of our work. First, the critical point of view. In other words, what stance do we take in relationship to these texts? Should we take a contemporary perspective or try to put ourselves in the shoes of a reader of that period? We chose the former option, because the latter seemed to us to be a rather difficult theoretical position to maintain since it would require us to set aside our own values and our current knowledge. We believe it is more rewarding to do a modern reading of these stories, to find links and patterns of image and meaning in common with works published since and to anticipate currents that appeared later, even though we risked seeming harsh or unfair towards some works.
Second, the choice of texts. To establish the corpus, we were able to borrow from Aurélien Boivin's book, Le Conte littéraire québécois au XIXe siècle (1975), without which our study would not have been possible. In his "attempt at an analytical and critical bibliography," Boivin lists a total of 1138 tales published in the numerous journals and magazines he examined. We are grateful for this painstaking work, which facilitated the research of scholars who later followed the trail he had blazed.
It means that, from the very beginning, we had to distinguish between a literary story, and an oral or folk tale. We chose to select only literary tales, which most of the time originated in the oral tradition, but of which a version had been finalized in writing: for this reason, they belong to literature. Hence there are no oral tales in this book, such as those collected by ethnologists, Germain Lemieux and Jean-Claude Dupont among others, in order to safeguard the living heritage, an approach more in keeping with the preservation of folklore.
However, in his book, and for reasons made explicit at the end of his foreword, Aurélien Boivin does not provide summaries of all the tales he listed - far from it, nor does he offer any critical commentary on the texts themselves. This left uncharted a vast territory for further research and analysis to assess the scope and literary quality of the supernatural corpus in the 19th century. Which is what we have attempted to do.
Thus, Le XIXe siècle fantastique en Amérique française (some of these texts were written by Acadians, Franco-Americans and francophones from other Canadian provinces) defines the corpus of supernatural tales by presenting a summary and a critical analysis of some 140 supernatural tales, short stories, legends and novels. The narrative genre was not a primary criterion for inclusion or exclusion. Whatever the type of narrative preferred by the author - tale, legend, short story - as long as the text was supernatural, it was selected.
But what is a supernatural story? We never stopped asking this question as we developed this study and built the corpus. It lies at the very heart of our project: to define the roots of fantasy in Quebec literature. Of course, the supernatural of the 19th century differs from the fantasy literature written in Quebec since the sixties. Quebec society has changed and fantasy literature, perhaps more than any other literary genre, was able to reflect, and even anticipate or inspire these changes.
Because of the religious climate that permeated Quebec society in the 19th century, very many supernatural tales feature figures from Catholic imagery: the devil, the Virgin Mary, baby Jesus, the saints; and they fictionalized transgressions against Christian virtues, which were then severely punished: pride, drunkenness, avarice, blasphemy, etc. We would venture to disagree with the good Doctor Ferron when he declared: "And if the tale is pleasant - that is one of its conditions - it is because it is not partial, because it does not belong to any sort of apology. I don't know any apologetic tales." In fact, there are dozens of apologies, but not taking them into account and excluding them from the corpus of the supernatural would be to neglect a major literary current that sustained the production of that period, it would amount to denying the existence of supernatural literature in the 19th century. Since those tales use religious fantasy and depict supernatural beings or events that logic by itself cannot explain, they can be included under a broad definition of fantasy literature.
Unlike Todorov, however, we do not consider doubt or hesitation to constitute the determining factor in qualifying a text as fantasy. If the supernatural phenomenon is rationally explained, as in Le Loup-Garou, by Benjamin Sulte, or in Louis Fréchette's Le Diable des forges, for instance, the story was not included in the corpus. The supernatural must be accepted. In addition, if a text can be read as a realistic story as well as a fantastic one, the realistic reading will be preferred, as in Une nuit dans une sucrerie, by Charles Deguise and Honoré Beaugrand's La Bête à grand'queue. That is also why stories of resurrectionists are not be found in the corpus, even though they are numerous and were considered supernatural at the time; these stories were influenced by the English Gothic (the forerunner of canonical fantasy literature) and Romanticism.
In short, to return to Todorov's classification used by Aurélien Boivin in one of his studies, only fantastic or fantasy tales that involve acceptance of the supernatural (the closest to pure fantasy, according to Todorov), and pure fantasy tales in which supernatural events do not bring about any particular reaction in the protagonists (for instance, fairy tales) were selected for this work. Purely fantasy and fantastic tales as we know them today (that is, removed from the Christian moral values of 19th-century society) are few in number compared to the supernatural tales that make up most of the corpus.
Still, it would be a mistake to think that the collection is homogenous, that all the texts are permeated with religiosity and moralizing messages. This is a myth that needs to be re-examined. One of this book's objectives is to shed a new light on this literary production. Among other things, it reveals a diversity of themes and inspiration that shatters any simplistic image of a basically monolithic and essentially edifying literature. Beneath the apparent order of Christian morality, subversion is smouldering... One need only think of Honoré Beaugrand's La Chasse-galerie or certain pacts with the devil that are turned to the advantage of human beings.
Among the themes uncovered by the successive analysis of these tales is the presence of the First Nations in the storytellers' imagination. Of course, one could object that the figure of the Savage is rarely presented in a favourable light, but the presence of the Amerindians and their mythology is certainly a revelation. While Louis Fréchette, Firmin Picard and Abbé Casgrain depicted the first inhabitants of the New World as bloodthirsty pagans, others, such as Joseph-Charles Taché in Le Grand-Lièvre et la Grande-Tortue, showed a certain degree of openness, dealing with this other culture without imposing the White Man's vision.
The reading of this corpus also demonstrates the vital importance of the St. Lawrence River and rivers in general as transportation corridors. They are central to many texts, whether those tell of expeditions to the North or drownings, ghost ships or will-o'-the-wisps. This is all the more surprising given that water is almost absent from contemporary Quebec literature, as demonstrated by Jacques Ferron in his magnificent novel Le Saint-Élias.
Le XIXe siècle fantastique en Amérique française offers an opportunity to rediscover some remarkable works that have been unjustly forgotten, and authors such as Firmin Picard (no collection of his stories has ever been published), Honoré Beaugrand, Pamphile LeMay, Faucher de Saint-Maurice, Joseph-Ferdinand Morissette and Joseph-Charles Taché, founders of a national literature that has since established its reputation.
Our research on this period of Quebec literary history has also afforded the possibility of verifying something we already suspected: Quebec science fiction made its appearance only in the 20th century. Jules-Paul Tardivel's novel, Pour la Patrie, is one of the rare SF, or proto-SF works, published in the 19th century. Its publication in 1895 heralded the birth of the genre. However, even though the anticipation in that novel links it to one of the forms that science fiction would take, the two main values of that separatist utopia, the Catholic religion and the French language, quite clearly indicate that this work belongs to the nineteenth century and that it does not celebrate progress at all, or the advent of a technological society, which is the very essence of science fiction.
We might be surprised that Jules Verne did not inspire any imitators whereas poets such as Louis Fréchette and Octave Crémazie were influenced by French poetry. Likewise, the figure of the vampire is totally absent from Quebec supernatural literature in the nineteenth century, but it might be explained by the fact that the theme finds its origin in an Anglo-Saxon tradition (Bram Stoker, Ann Radcliffe).
Twenty-five years after the publication of Aurélien Boivin's work, Le XIXe siècle fantastique en Amérique française pushes back the limits of knowledge with the tales it unearthed from journals and magazines of the nineteenth century. It is hoped that other scholars will have opportunities to use the documentation collected here and the issues raised by the analysis of this raw material in order to develop, for instance, the study of the Devil, or the sociocultural symbolism of the werewolf. Some theses have already addressed these subjects, as can be seen in the section "Recensions des études" ("Reviews of other studies").
While reading the contents of the 140 texts reviewed here, the reader can already distinguish the main patterns of this mosaic and develop an overall picture of the first manifestations of fantasy literature in francophone America.
Claude Janelle
© 1999 Éditions Alire & Claude Janelle
To find out what happens next...
