Morel, suivi de Gilbert La Rocque, Montréal et la modernité pourrie

Morel is a social novel that recalls the evolution of the city of Montréal throughout the twentieth century, in particular the working-class neighbourhoods of le Centre-Sud and Hochelaga- Maisonneuve, via the personal and professional life of Jean-Claude Morel, who was born during the Great Depression. The eponymous Morel, a construction worker, participates in major engineering works that change the face of Montréal (including sky-scrapers, the métro, highways, interchanges, the Louis-Hyppolite-La Fontaine tunnel, and the Olympic Stadium), and is also a collateral victim of the modernity he helps shape: the destruction of the Faubourg à M’lasse, the expropriations ahead of the construction of the Notre-Dame highway, the city’s deindustrialization and the gentrification push him further East and break up his family, while his dangerous and strenuous profession breaks his body. Morel questions the way we tell a character’s story and the history of a city by making chronology its key formal issue, through constant use of analepses and “temporal telescoping” between chapters, where the action at the end of a chapter is continued in the beginning of the next, even though the time and location of the action may differ. The novel is, therefore, a “fiction of history”: it questions those characteristics shared by fiction and by the discipline of history alike, such as narrativity, focalization, documentation reliability, and first and foremost chronology.    ///    Gilbert La Rocque, Montréal and the Rotten Modernity is a literary essay in which, as a fiction writer myself, I enter into dialogue with the work of Montréal writer Gilbert La Rocque (1943- 1984). Having published six novels and a television play published between 1970 and 1984, La Rocque gained recognition among his peers as a critical writer and editor, and yet he remains a marginal figure in Québec literary studies. This essay attempts to reframe him into his generation’s literary ecosystem by studying how his representation of Montréal is a manifestation of the “catastrophism at the heart of Québec’s modernity” (Pierre Nepveu, L’écologie du réel), mostly though the figures of the city as a “swallowing monster” and a necropolis inhabited by a population of parasites, insects, and vermin. The concept of Québec’s modernity is discussed within an historical perspective, from the representation of Montréal in nineteenth literature to the Quiet Revolution, when Québec finalizes its “entry in modernity” (Marcel Fournier). La Rocque’s novels are influenced by the various literary movements that evolved in Québec literature throughout the particular modernity of his fifteen years of production: militant literature with a “character-nation” as a protagonist, autoreferential novels characteristic of the writing modernity (Jean Fisette), and “writer novels” depicting the professionalization of Québec’s literary institution. All are manifestations of a specifically Québécois “advanced” or “late modernity”, which, considering the omnipresence of death and decay in La Rocque’s novels, is a modernity synonymous with putrefaction. This freely composed essay with the characteristic speculation of creative writing in University (Jean-Simon DesRochers) can be considered as an essay-discovery (Gérard Bessette) that resembles Victor-Lévy Beaulieu’s series dedicated to the authors that influenced him.

Keyphrases: Montréal, Creative writing, Research-Creation, Montreal, History of Montreal, History of Quebec, 20th Century, Modernity, Quebec literature, Decay