The Relevance of the Carnivalesque in the Québec Novel

The Bakhtinian concept of space is topological rather than topographic, and encompasses the cosmic, the social and the corporeal; its function in the Quebec novel consists in debasing the hierarchical verticality of Lent and of the "official feast." As Carnival is an anti-law,"law" in the Quebec novel will be defined as the chronotope of the sacred space (the land or "terre" of Quebec) in the genre known as the "novel of the land" ("le roman de Ia terre"). Until the Second World War, this chronotope transforms an Augustinian political view of the civitas dei into literary proselytism, via the ideology of agricultural messianism. Sanctification implies closure of space and of the text; the "outside" is debased, as is textual "difference," that is, carnivalesque writing as it appears, for example, in La Scouine by Albert Laberge or in Marie Calumet by Rodolphe Girard. During the 1940s, the "introspective novel" (Robert Charbonneau, Robert Elie, Robert Choquette) also connotes the "upper" euphorically and the "lower" dysphorically, but at this historical point as a function of the sanctification of the individual according to a Thomist hierarchy. The quest of the hero can be seen as the ascent of a vertical ladder of time/space/society/values. The novel of the 1960s takes on a carnivalesque air: former sacred spaces are diminished in number and importance or are debased; new spaces appear where the body communicates with other bodies and the world. The space of knowledge is not God, but the land. Novels of this period (by M.C. Blais, R. Carrier, A. Hebert) are constructed around two paradigms according to a Manichean view of the world, and bear a great predictability, thus leading to a new set of "upside down" cliches. The carnivalesque multiple is completely realized in Hubert Aquin's first two novels. Space ceases to bear meaning other than as a metaphor for horizontal kinetic writing. The text becomes the open space of a continuous game between narrator and reader. The importance given to the margin/marginality (the footnotes), the masquerade of characters and of polysemic words, the narrative games that deconstruct the medieval Aquinian world create the space of carnivalesque scriptural relativity. But Aquin also gives a political dimension to his carnivalesque writing: his position is that only a writing of chaos can correspond to a nation which is obsolete ("revolu") and imprisoned in stasis while still aspiring to a revolution. The mediation between stasis and movement is the text which acts as a detonator or pharmakon in the mind of the reader. The study of the carnivalesque in the Quebec novel leads us to the discovery of an impressive number of heroes/writers/pharmakos/witches, all having the same kinetic transformatory function which is accomplished by the same medium: the word. They point to a society in transition during the 1960s and 1970s. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol9/iss1/9 THE RELEVANCE OF THE CARNIVALESQUE IN THE QUEBEC NOVEL MAROUSSIA AHMED McMaster University "A Quebecois cannot read Bakhtine's Rabelais without particular delectation. He sees himself, so to speak, in every line," wrote the French-Canadian critic Andre Belleau back in 1970.' Indeed, the Bakhtinian concept of the carnivalesque seems to provide a most appropriate means of reading the Quebec novel. The forms and symbols of the Carnival's idiom are filled with the pathos of change and renewal, with the sense of gay relativity. They are marked by "the peculiar logic of the 'inside out' of the 'turnabout,' of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties-comic crownings and uncrownings" (Bakhtin 11). The horizontal, egalitarian and topologic structure of the Carnival lowers the hierarchical verticality of Lent and of the "official feast," for "the narrow, vertical, extratemporal model of the world, with its absolute top and bottom, its system of ascents and descents, was in the process of reconstruction" (Bakhtin 403). As for masks and various games, these help create a climate of joyous relativity during Carnival. The fact that the Carnival is a transgression of the law, and therefore is anti-law, obliges us to define the law, just as Bakhtin perceives the Carnival in its relation to Lent, or Renaissance history in its relation to medieval history. For the purposes of this article, we shall consider as "the law" the traditional Quebec novel (the genre known as the "roman de la terre" which flourished until 1945, and also the introspective novel of the 1940s and 1950s). After 1960, in opposition to the traditional novel there will be a transgression of the novel's signifieds and signifiers (as in the novels by Roch Carrier, Marie-Claire Blais, Anne Hebert, Jacques Godbout, Hubert Aquin and Rejean Ducharme, to mention only a few). The horizontal