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Régionalisme et nationalisme

Quebec separatism in Canadian utopian fiction and the quest for a postcolonial future

Le séparatisme au Québec dans la fiction utopique canadienne et la quête d’un avenir postcolonial
Ralph Pordzik
p. 11-22

Résumé

Cet essai traite du rôle des auteurs de fiction spéculative dans l’élaboration d’une identité politique particulière au Québec. Au fil des ans, les conflits politiques ont, au Canada, inspiré un grand nombre de nouvelles et de romans portant sur les conséquences de la dissolution de la Confédération qui, pour la plupart, évoquent le morcellement du pays suite au succès politique des mouvements séparatistes. Les utopies à la recherche d’un avenir où les différents groupes culturels vivent en parfaite symbiose dans une société démocratique sont rares cependant. Cet article propose une lecture de The Underdogs (1979), une satire politique de William Weintraub, qui permet de démontrer le sens des fictions moins impliquées dans la poursuite d’allégories englobantes d’une identité nationale que dans la célébration d’une diversité culturelle et sociale propre à un contexte multiculturel. Dans The Underdogs, Weintraub valorise une culture politique plus « intégrée » et a foi dans un avenir où une coexistence harmonieuse des différents groupes, pour peu qu’ils réussissent à se défaire de la rigueur des catégories linguistiques et des croyances dans des absolus culturels tels que la race, la nation et l’identité. Comme le spécifie cet article, le roman devrait se lire comme un compte rendu majeur sur la crise culturelle québécoise des années 1970, un mélange de perceptions régionales liées à un concept plus large d’affiliation et d’échange cross-culturels.

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Texte intégral

  • 1 Noel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in H. Aram Veeser (Ed.), The New (...)
  • 2 Cf. Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” in Veeser 1989, 37.
  • 3 Allan Weiss, “Separations and Unities : Approaches to Québec Separatism in English- and French-Cana (...)

1There are particular moments in history, in what most of us are accustomed to regard as a logic of recurrent patterns or principles of action, when the chain of events is disrupted by an uncommon incident or intrusion into an otherwise smooth chronology of blunt facts. The intelligible whole of a sequential, framing narrative, along with the ‘essential’ laws that appear to govern it, is offset by a sudden flash of otherness, after which the meta touto or “after this”1 will have changed its purpose forever, thus giving a new twist to the logic of historical causation the chronicler fabricates in order to penetrate the happening of past events. I should like to think that French President Charles de Gaulle’s ill-fated visit to Montreal, Quebec, during the 1967 Centennial Celebrations marks one of these particular historical moments, when the political and cultural context is unexpectedly transformed to accommodate one, two, or even more of several as yet unrealised possibilities; when culture and politics enter into various exchanges or negotiations, with practices designed ‘political’ in so far as they seek to give to a specific event its representative historical and cultural significance.2 Some of us may remember that de Gaulle was asked to leave the country immediately after his famous speech on the steps of the Montreal City Hall in which he declared “Vive le Québec! Vive leQuébeclibre!” to a massed crowd.3 His overt declaration of support for Quebec separatism outraged Canadian officials and energised the struggle of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ). De Gaulle did leave the country never to return again; what has remained with Quebec, however, is the memory of a divisive speech that brought into the open the conflicts about nationhood and cultural autonomy simmering in French Canada ever since the end of the Seven Years War (1756-63).

Quebec Separatism and ‘Speculative Fiction’

  • 4 Weiss 1998, 55. Five years after the last referendum on Quebec separation this conflict is still an (...)
  • 5 See John Robert Colombo, “Four Hundred Years of Fantastic Literature in Canada,” in Andrea Paradis (...)
  • 6 What francophone Quebec writers feared, by contrast, was the threat of a nuclear war, and so the 19 (...)

2In his survey article on Quebec Separatism and Fantastic Literature Allan Weiss notes that de Gaulle’s “infamous” ‘Vive le Québec libre!’ may indeed have inspired several short stories and novels engaging the possible consequences of the dissolution of the Confederation.4 A first glance reveals that a significant portion of Canadian dystopias written in the late 1960s and early 1970s is made up from anxious scenarios focusing on the break-up of the country as a result of the political breakthrough of separatist movements. The international vogue of dystopian writing has been particularly influential with regard to writers of mainstream fiction.5 Both Hugh Hood’s early story “After the Sirens” (1960) and Margaret Laurence’s “A Queen in Thebes”(1964) detail the changes brought about by a nuclear attack, while Louis Capson’s stage drama The True Northern Blueprint Trilogy (1972) chronicles the future rise to power of a ruthless world dictator.6

  • 7 See Colombo, 1995, 39.
  • 8 See Weiss 1998, 57. The earliest francophone text of the genre is Jules-Paul Tardivel’s Pour la pat (...)

3Incidents of the late sixties—the FLQ bombing campaigns against federal institutions, the murder of Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte by FLQ “cells”—appear to have provided the most suitable spur to this imagining of ‘balkanised’ future Canadas. The over 40 works in this sub-genre7 include Bruce Powe’s Killing Ground: The Canadian Civil War (1968), vaguely anticipating the October crisis of 1970, Eric Koch’s The French Kiss. A Tongue in Cheek Political Fantasy (1969), in which a French observer compares a future separated Quebec with 19th century revolutionary Europe, and Hélène Holden’s dystopia After the Fact (1986) which portrays a post-separation Quebec suffering from violence, food shortages and economic hardship. Hugh Hood’s well-known You Can’t Get There From Here (1972), set in an imaginary African state split between two races with different languages and customs both mistrustful of the other, invites the reader to see its menacing landscape in terms of a national allegory addressing the threat of separation and civil war. More recently, genre disaster fiction has provoked the mirth of writers such as Spider Robinson (Mindkiller, 1982) and Margaret Atwood. In The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) Atwood not only draws on widespread fears of an invasion from the USA, but also debunks the feminist utopianism of the 1970s and its unorthodox proposals for the future abolishment of man. The only francophone novel of this period is Jean-Michel Wyl’s Quebec Banana State (1978), a satirical account of future Quebec as a communist satellite state ruled by Stalinist bureaucrats.8

  • 9 The other novels included in the tetralogy are The Disinherited (1974), The Sweet Summer of Kitty M (...)
  • 10 Matt Cohen, The Colours of War, Kingston, Ontario: Quarry, 1993, 144.
  • 11 Ibid., 59.
  • 12 Ibid., 60.

4A sense of the violence inspired by the separation campaign of the Parti Québécois can also be traced in Matt Cohen’s The Colours of War (1977), a near-future dystopia of exploding violence and the second of his four ‘Salem novels.’9 Allusions to military conflicts and terrorists organisations remain vague and anecdotal through much of the text; what transpires, however, is the writer’s gross rejection of revolutions informed by ‘grand’ redemptive schemes and unitary concepts. Cohen’s portrayal of Perestrello, the political leader of the terrorists, as someone “who has reduced everything to what can be understood, what can be taught in arithmetic lessons”10 corresponds to his dismissal of radical utopists who act in the service of absolute doctrines, those who believe themselves to be “pure”11 or like “gardeners, cutting away what is diseased, leaving what is healthy”12—an inkling of the FLQ’s leftist ideology and its identification with Marxist liberation movements throughout the Third World in the 1970s.

  • 13 See W. H. NEW, A History of Canadian Literature, London : MacGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989, f (...)
  • 14 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, Toronto, Canada: McClelland & Stewart, 1985, 288.
  • 15 Ibid., 289.

5In a comparable, similarly anecdotal manner, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) refers marginally to events going on in Quebec in the wake of the election of the political leader of the Parti Québécois René Levesque (1976). Her ‘gynaecological 1984’ is followed by “Historical Notes” relating a conference meeting of 22nd century historians who have gathered in the Arctic to reconstruct the dystopian past from the point of view of the post-dystopian future—a future strikingly reminiscent of present time North America. These notes, suggesting that the regime was overthrown after a few years and that North American Indians and Inuit now play a significant role in the society that has succeeded the republic of Gilead, serve as a final framing device throwing the whole narrative into uncertainty. One point that remains particularly disputable is whether Atwood, when she conceived her wretched scheme of a world falling into the hands of illegitimate political rulers, had in mind the dispute over Quebec’s separatist politics as well.13 There are, for instance, broad hints of the colonising powers’ troubles in dealing with “the growing number of rebellions within their own empires,”14 of constitutional plans for the creation of “National Homelands,” and of handbooks for the “destabilisation of foreign governments.”15 A sense of definition, of closure, is deliberately avoided, so that what is attained is a deferment of readerly gratification. That critics still largely fail to agree on Atwood’s elusive treatment of issues of futurity thus lends weight to the presumption that her rendering of a right-wing, religiously fundamentalist republic may not only have to do with the feminist cause, but also with a specific interest in showing that the seizure of power by political and religious fanatics always involves a wilful reorganisation of society to deny minority groups any rights at all and therefore a desire to contest their historical claim to cultural and political representation. Inherent in Atwood’s dystopia is a recognition not only of the unreliability of all accounts of the historical past, but also of the ideological bias behind them. The ironical staging of a conference in the year 2195 illustrates her view that history is not something fully and empirically given, but a textually mediated version of the past—a version one cannot only assume to be merely contingent but must also presume to be consequent upon social and cultural processes of preservation and effacement.

A Quebec Postcolonial Utopia?

  • 16 Weiss 1998, 53.
  • 17 Ibid., 53.

6Presumably, then, Allan Weiss is right in maintaining that the main motivation behind Anglophone utopian writing is that of fear over Quebec autonomy and the threat it poses to the established ideal of cultural and political unity in postcolonial Canada.16 His conviction that Anglophone writers are “afraid of what might happen if Quebec separates, and Francophones [...] of what might happen if it did not,”17 is reflected in the view John R. Colombo takes in his essay on the cultural origins of the fantastic genre in Canada. He argues that

  • 18 Colombo 1995, 43.

Canadians have never really believed that this improbable country could work, so the ‘National Disaster Scenario’ is almost second nature: pieces of the country are always threatening to separate, on the brink of losing their primary resource, or otherwise falling apart.18

  • 19 Ibid., 43.
  • 20 My admittedly rather disparaging judgement receives support from the views held by many critics and (...)

7As both of these arguments suggest, English language writers seem to feel the greatest need to explore the possible results of separation when the likelihood of its coming true is greatest. Concerned about their political survival, they see in the writing of speculative fiction an opportunity to draw attention to their plight, to give an account of their desperate attempts at preserving their inherited English language and culture in a neo-colonial, French-dominated republic. That it is not altogether impossible to take a different view of the problem is hinted at by John Colombo when he remarks that a “significant proportion of Canadians still maintains strong ties to the other nations and cultural heritages from which we came. [The] official Canadian policy of multiculturalism attempts to preserve a mosaic of interacting but distinctive cultures.”19 If this holds true, then it comes as a surprise that the political confidence registered here is nowhere reflected in literature.20 For where are the novels striving to substantialise Colombo’s critical aside on Canada’s allegedly ‘official policy’ of multiculturalism? Where are the utopias prospecting an alternative future where the different cultural groups exist side by side in a democratic society, alternatives less concerned with the pursuit of all-encompassing allegories of national identity than with the celebration of cultural and social diversity in a multicultural context? As far as I can judge they still remain to be written. The only novel by an anglophone writer I can come up with here is William Weintraub’s The Underdogs (1979), and the few remaining, arguably accomplished texts are written by authors of French origin. There is, for instance, Gérard Etienne’s hilarious Un Ambassadeur-macoute à Montréal (1979), in which a visitor from Haiti makes use of voodoo to help the government solve the FLQ terrorist problem; there is Jean O’Neil’s opulently fantastic Giriki et le prince de Quécan (1982), in which the archangel Raphael appears to the narrator and announces that the country’s future can only be assured if it returns to a medieval hierarchy—presided over by a Parti Québécois bureaucrat named Pierre Boucher and his dull bride (named, ironically, after the postal code of a fan of the narrator).

  • 21 See NEW 1989, 217. In the 1960s several journals and magazines came into life that espoused the ide (...)
  • 22 See A. R. Heiserman, “Satire in Utopia,” PMLA, 78, 1963, 163-74.
  • 23 James Carens, The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh, Washington : U of Washington P, 1966, 152.

8Thus, if it weren’t for the sake of William Weintraub’s satire, I should have to refrain from embarking upon further circumstantial details about cross-cultural perspectives in utopian fiction at this point. Parading as another literary anecdote—or should I rather say, ‘footnote’—of recent Canadian literary history, The Underdogs slithers provocatively between the options of a cultural conflict in which one side struggles to survive and the other appears to have little incentive to address the neo-colonial attitudes and implications of the rise of “Québecicité”21 as a distinctive problem at all. Utopian satires, as we all know, have a particular interest in rebuking human vices or follies, in denouncing foolishness wherever it may be found in society.22 They function by diminishing pomposity and hypocrisy through ridicule, while at the same time finding in the very irrationality and resilience of human nature a safeguard against the straitjacket of conformity. Little can be gained, however, from judging such satires as prophesies of the condition of life in the future. The real point they make is that the brave new world is always ‘now;’ their satirical force derives from the fact that the authors have “carried to certain extremes of exaggeration tendencies which already undeniably exist” in their own present.23 In The Underdogs these satirical exaggerations or caricatures are implemented in a fictional context of cross-cultural negotiation that renders the book one of the most important literary ‘events’ in 20th century speculative writing from Quebec.

William Weintraub’s The Underdogs: a Satirical Dystopia

  • 24 William Weintraub, The Underdogs, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979, 101.

9In the novel’s wacky world, future Quebec is already on the verge of disintegration, dependent on loans from the rich, highly developed socialist Senegal. With the exception of government officials all Québécois are poor, but the Anglos are the poorest of all—due to the Linguistic Purity Laws that make it impossible for them to improve their position in the social hierarchy. Demoted, second-class-citizens, they now live in the sleaziest slums, work for next to nothing at menial jobs, and ride rundown bicycles, the automobile having virtually disappeared. But there are also those who have hopes for an improved future—the members of the Anglo Liberation Army, who use even the most outrageous guerilla tactics in their fight for an independent “Angloland” or “New Canada” in which English people will no longer be forced to live next to the Québécois, the “dubious lot” with their “rotten government” and their endless “jokes about the Queen.”24 In the midst of all the turbulence, two young Anglos, Paul, an urban farmer tending crops in what was formerly the Sun Life Building in the heart of downtown Montreal, and Mona, a seamstress, seek safety and comfort while attempting to escape the wrath of the repressive Anglo elders and the control of the omnipresent Morality Patrol.

  • 25 Ibid., 224.
  • 26 Ibid., 17.
  • 27 Ibid., 77.
  • 28 Ibid., 96.
  • 29 Ibid., 122.
  • 30 Ibid., 148.
  • 31 Ibid., 89.

10The Underdogs is a controversial and burlesque satire addressing the folly of revolutionaries all over the world who throw themselves into the liberation struggle “to make sure that the right philosophy would prevail.”25 In the drabness of the surroundings it describes it resembles nothing so much as Orwell’s 1984; scarcity, disorder, and grubbiness—“grimy streets and sordid back alleys [...] decrepit brick houses [...] with sagging floors and collapsing balconies”26—characterise Weintraub’s Quebec of the near future. The tendency of bureaucratic socialism to reduce human personality to notations on file cards made to adjust to the ‘idea in history’ is satirised with special regard to the Québécois version of parochial communism (“now that Quebec had entered post-industrial Age many Africans considered Quebec itself to be part of the Third World,”27 ironically captured in the country’s rural backwardness and its dependence on the import of bicycles “from East Germany, or rakish but rickety machines from Vietnam.”28 To achieve his satirical effect, as he sets out after the warped sentimentalism and provincialism he regards as the main features of the separatist Quebec welfare state of the future, Weintraub inverts all the values and attitudes dominating the intellectual and political climate of Quebec in the 1970s. In his dystopian police state it is not the FLQ but the Anglo Liberation Movement that loses itself in heated arguments over the name of the future republic; here the would-be-revolutionaries envy “those old Separatist terrorists of the 1960s”, they who “really had it made, in the F.L.Q.29 It is a place where "freaky sociologists” take delight in the attention they are being rewarded with by a corrupt elite, a whole army of them acting in support of the ruling agenda, carrying out endless polls and referendums and “cook[ing] the books so as to give the President whatever results he wanted;”30 here the public is so isolated from the outside world that it can be manipulated into believing that Scottish poet Robert Burns represents “the greedy Anglo capitalists who exploited our people in Montreal for two hundred years.”31

  • 32 Ibid., 53.
  • 33 Ibid., 110.
  • 34 Ibid., 104.
  • 35 Ibid., 114.
  • 36 Ibid., 79.

11It would appear prejudiced to accuse Weintraub of pursuing a satirical strategy designed to ridicule the efforts of the Québécois intellectuals and writers of the 1970s to come to terms with their colonial heritage and their fears of assimilation. Rather than deepening the gulf between the antagonistic social groups, he seeks to reconcile francophone, anglophone and other traditions with regard to the political ideal of a cross-cultural society. Textual representations of the different cultures that helped shape the history of the province are a significant part of this strategy. We are, for instance, offered a view of the motley atmosphere on Wellington Street, Montreal, before the take-over of the separatists. We gather that it was the Irish who “made Wellington Street a street with spirit; [...] convivial [...] busy with the comings and goings of members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the United Irish Societies, the Knights of Columbus and the Canadian Legion.”32 We are also informed about the contributions of other migrant cultures, about the “song and story” of the “great-grandparents from Cracow and Bucharest and Odessa” gaining their “first toehold on freedom, finally safe from the whips of the Cossacks,”33 the “Italians in Montreal” and their ‘culinary’ attempts at maintaining their cultural identity.34 The novel’s constant allusions to a form of democratic freedom available for everybody, a culture in which Diderot and Robert Burns, “Cartesian Logic” and “Anglo Pragmatism,” “French philosophy”35 and “common law”36 may be represented on equal terms demonstrate that racial and national prejudices as well as social inequalities can be overcome only by a practice of mutual understanding and acceptance.

  • 37 Ibid., 194.
  • 38 Idem.
  • 39 The origins of Canadian nationalism can be traced back to Donald Creighton’s immensely successful b (...)
  • 40 Weintraub 1979, 225.
  • 41 Originally a joual term used to characterise Anglophone attitudes to the québécois. Joual was a Mon (...)

12Not surprisingly, then, Weintraub invests his faith in a more integrated culture in what may be described as the political outlines of federal Canada in the 1970s. Towards the end of the novel a programmatic speech is given by the “scholarly guerrilla”37 Robert in which the idea is promoted that before separation Canada was “alone among the countries of the world in not being nationalistic. [...] It was ahead of its time. If there is ever to be One World, with universal peace, it will have to be like Canada was[.]”38 Although not entirely unambiguous in itself—nationalist sentiments shaped Canadian culture in the 1950s but were severely challenged form the 1960s onwards—,39 the statement turns into a distinguishing trait what has often been conceived of as a major shortcoming—namely, the lack of national and cultural unity –, redirecting it in order to serve the idea of a democratic future. In the midst of a growing obsession with national ‘purity’ Paul preserves his international outlook given rise to by a thorough understanding of the lessons history has taught him. Having become aware that “bilingualism carried the day in 1759,” he realises that “Anglos must always remember to be bilingual. Unilingualism always meant defeat in this part of the world.”40 With a compromise finally worked out and political negotiations between Anglos and Québécois under way, the novel points thus toward the future as an open process to which all the different groups, the ‘speakwhiters’ as well as the Nègres blancs d’Amérique,41 may profitably contribute if only they succeed in purging themselves of rigid linguistic categories and beliefs in cultural absolutes such as race, nation and identity.

Conclusion

  • 42 I am using the term here in the sense of Bill Ashcroft’s definition of postcolonial literatures as (...)
  • 43 Weiss 1998, 58.

13The Underdogs must be read as an important statement on the cultural crisis of Quebec in the 1970s, mixing a regional angle of vision with a broader concept of cross-cultural affiliation and exchange. Where formerly many utopian renderings of the racial and cultural divide in Quebec merely registered similarities between the colonial and the dystopian without being able to transcend them, The Underdogs acquires a new sense of possibility, making a deliberate move to replace outmoded or debilitating paradigms of definition and containment with more flexible patterns of transformation and renewal. This is significant insofar as the older tendency to seize upon received doctrines of utopian projection is modified and enriched by the effort to weave alternative modes and perceptions into the individual work and to provide them with a new and unique utopian voice. Presenting what I feel tempted to call the first postcolonial utopian novel from Quebec,42The Underdogs breaks away from the textual renderings of “mutual paranoia” as offered in a vast number of fictions from a country in which writers show every day “how little they have in common, and how impossible it is to take their coexistence for granted.”43

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Bibliographie

BELL John, “Uneasy Union: Further Examples of English-Language Science Fiction Concerning Canadian Separatist Conflicts,” Science-Fiction Studies, 9, 1982, 82-88.

BELL John, “The Persistence of Division: Further Examples of English-Language Science Fiction Concerning Canadian Separatist Conflicts,” Science-Fiction Studies, 11, 1984, 190-193.

Carens James, The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh, Washington: U of Washington P, 1966.

Colas-Charpentier Hélène, “Four Québécois Dystopias 1963-1972,“ Science-Fiction Studies, 20, 1993, 383-393.

COLOMBO John Robert, “Four Hundred Years of Fantastic Literature in Canada,” in Andrea Paradis (Ed.), Out of This World. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, Ottawa: Quarry / National Library of Canada, 1995, 28-40.

Fineman Noel, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in H. Aram Veeser (Ed.), The New Historicism, New York & London: Routledge, 1989, 49-76.

Gallagher Catherine, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” in H. Aram Veeser (Ed.), The New Historicism, New York & London: Routledge, 1989, 37-48.

Heiserman A. R., “Satire in Utopia,” PMLA, 78, 1963, 163-74.

Ketterer David, Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1992.

NEW W. H., A History of Canadian Literature, London: MacGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989.

Weiss Allan, “Separations and Unities: Approaches to Québec Separatism in English- and French-Canadian Fantastic Literature,” Science-Fiction Studies, 25, 1998, 53-61.

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Notes

1 Noel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in H. Aram Veeser (Ed.), The New Historicism, New York and London: Routledge, 1989, 53.

2 Cf. Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” in Veeser 1989, 37.

3 Allan Weiss, “Separations and Unities : Approaches to Québec Separatism in English- and French-Canadian Fantastic Literature,” Science-Fiction Studies, 25, 1998, 59.

4 Weiss 1998, 55. Five years after the last referendum on Quebec separation this conflict is still an issue of major importance; its liveliness is far from suffering from the defeat of those who refused to accept the new constitutional deal enacted in 1982, who voted “yes”" in 1980 (40%) and yet again in 1995 (49%). See the article by Wsevolod W. Isajiw, “Quebec in Question,” in Wsevolod W. Isajiw (Ed.), Understanding Diversity: Ethnicity and Race in the Canadian Context, Toronto: TEP, 1999, 226-33.

5 See John Robert Colombo, “Four Hundred Years of Fantastic Literature in Canada,” in Andrea Paradis (Ed.), Out of This World. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, Ottawa : Quarry / National Library of Canada, 1995, 39, and David Ketterer, Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana UP, 1992, 71f.

6 What francophone Quebec writers feared, by contrast, was the threat of a nuclear war, and so the 1960s and 1970s saw the publication of a series of dystopias such as Yves Thériault’s Si la bombe m’était contée (1962), Suzanne Martel’s Quatre Montréalais en l’an 3000 (1963) and Maurice Gagnon’s Les Tours de Babylone (1972). For a more detailed account see Hélène Colas-Charpentier, “Four Québécois Dystopias 1963-1972,” Science-Fiction Studies, 20, 1993, 383-393; John BELL, “Uneasy Union : Further Examples of English-Language Science Fiction Concerning Canadian Separatist Conflicts,” Science-Fiction Studies, 9, 1982, 82-88, and “The Persistence of Division : Further Examples of English-Language Science Fiction Concerning Canadian Separatist Conflicts,” Science-Fiction Studies, 11, 1984, 190-193.

7 See Colombo, 1995, 39.

8 See Weiss 1998, 57. The earliest francophone text of the genre is Jules-Paul Tardivel’s Pour la patrie (1895), which concerns a conspiracy by Canada’s English Protestant minority to change the country’s political system from a federation into a legislative union. It was followed by another work from the extreme political right, Ubald Paquin’s La Cité dans le fers (1925).

9 The other novels included in the tetralogy are The Disinherited (1974), The Sweet Summer of Kitty Malone (1979) and Flowers of Darkness (1981).

10 Matt Cohen, The Colours of War, Kingston, Ontario: Quarry, 1993, 144.

11 Ibid., 59.

12 Ibid., 60.

13 See W. H. NEW, A History of Canadian Literature, London : MacGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989, for an account of Margaret Atwood’s “cultural affiliations to Loyalist Ontario” as opposed to the claim to nationhood and cultural autonomy voiced by many writers and intellectuals born in disloyal Quebec. New argues that, although one of Atwood’s main concerns is to counter the restraint imposed on political articulateness by the “ ‘circle game’ of the small-town Loyalist inheritance in Canada,” her inherited idiom is nevertheless both an “inhibition” and the “chief available means by which to free oneself from inhibition” (294).

14 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, Toronto, Canada: McClelland & Stewart, 1985, 288.

15 Ibid., 289.

16 Weiss 1998, 53.

17 Ibid., 53.

18 Colombo 1995, 43.

19 Ibid., 43.

20 My admittedly rather disparaging judgement receives support from the views held by many critics and historians of Canadian literature. W. H. New, for instance, opines that “plurality was not a québécois ideal; unity was. ‘Nationhood’ was about to be redefined. With the Quiet Revolution underway in the 1960 [...] Quebec writers and politicians (they were often both) were drawing further away from Canada even as the anglophone version of Canada was shifting towards a norm of biculturalism [...] Writers began to seek structures of expression that would rephrase and so reinterpret their culture, free it from the definitions of the ‘Other,’ so to speak, and hence encode a new authenticity of self” (NEW, 1989, 212).

21 See NEW 1989, 217. In the 1960s several journals and magazines came into life that espoused the idea of a free, secular and separatist society in Quebec. Many of them allied themselves with Marxist thought, Sartrean existentialism and the whole process of decolonisation which during these years was bringing independence to former British and French colonies. Some writers of French Canadian origin were committed to the cause of an independent and socialist state in Quebec, insisting on the term ‘québecicité’ as a cultural marker of the ‘new’ culture’s distinct national consciousness.

22 See A. R. Heiserman, “Satire in Utopia,” PMLA, 78, 1963, 163-74.

23 James Carens, The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh, Washington : U of Washington P, 1966, 152.

24 William Weintraub, The Underdogs, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979, 101.

25 Ibid., 224.

26 Ibid., 17.

27 Ibid., 77.

28 Ibid., 96.

29 Ibid., 122.

30 Ibid., 148.

31 Ibid., 89.

32 Ibid., 53.

33 Ibid., 110.

34 Ibid., 104.

35 Ibid., 114.

36 Ibid., 79.

37 Ibid., 194.

38 Idem.

39 The origins of Canadian nationalism can be traced back to Donald Creighton’s immensely successful book Dominion of the North (1944), a conservative view of Canadian history that fastens on tensions between anglophone and francophone Canada as the distinguishing feature of Canadian society. Creighton had a direct influence on writers, in particular on Hugh MacLennan whose novel Two Solitudes (1945) neatly epitomised the prevailing national sensibility.

40 Weintraub 1979, 225.

41 Originally a joual term used to characterise Anglophone attitudes to the québécois. Joual was a Montreal dialect created in the 1960s to become a verbal medium of much new literary work and also a political comment in its own right. The role of language and speech as agents of political change is a major issue in Weintraub’s novel.

42 I am using the term here in the sense of Bill Ashcroft’s definition of postcolonial literatures as thriving on the abrogation of the institutional practices of a literary “patronage system” and on the “appropriation of language and writing for new and distinctive usages.” Bill Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures, London and New York : Routledge, 1989, 6.

43 Weiss 1998, 58.

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Ralph Pordzik, « Quebec separatism in Canadian utopian fiction and the quest for a postcolonial future »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], Vol. III - n°2 | 2005, mis en ligne le 26 octobre 2009, consulté le 15 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/2321 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.2321

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Auteur

Ralph Pordzik

(Würzburg, Germany)
Ralph Pordzik received his Ph.D. from the Free University, Berlin, and currently teaches English Literature and British Cultural Studies at the University of Würzburg. His postdoctoral study of South African poetry, entitled Die moderne englischsprachige Dichtung in Südafrika 1950-1980, was published in 2000. He is also the author of The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures (2001) and The Wonder of Travel: Fiction, Tourism and the Social Construction of the Nostalgic (2005).

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