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Article Excerpt
... l'autre, c'est ce qui ne s'invente jamais et qui n'aura jamais attendu votre invention. L'autre appelle a venir et cela n'arrive qu' a plusieurs voix.
Jacques Derrida (61)
In an analysis of English Canada's quest for identity Pierre Spriet maintains that the Canadian quest is heavily dependent, in our literature, on a sense of place and references to Canadian people and events. For a novel to be considered "Canadian," be says, it must abound in Canadian place names, people, and occurrences (37-38). But in recent years, the focus of this quest has shifted. The question more relevant today is: which people? which places?
For most Anglophones the "Canadian" canon includes Atwood, Mistry, Shields, Ondaatje, and other English-language superstars. Few will add Jacques Poulin, Rejean Ducbarme or Ying Chen to the list, even though these, and many other French-language Canadian authors, are available in English translation (Chattier 118-172). Ladouceur (97) notes that as early as 1879 Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau (335) compared this situation to the intertwined spiral staircases of the Chateau Chambord. And more recently, Stratford observed that, "[i]n Canada, literatures in French and English have grown up side by side in roughly parallel fashion as far as their rhythms, types, and conditions of development are concerned" (131). Though attempts are periodically made to remedy this situation, the parallel existences are still apparent in English/French mentalities and in the educational institutions and publishing industries that keep them relatively ignorant of each other. And so, we continue to be faced with a biliterary dilemma. Some write in English about the Anglophone experience, others in French about the Francophone experience, but seldom do we find the mutual curiosity towards the "Anglo-Franco other" that we find towards the multi-ethnic voices expressed in more recent literatures of ethnicity in Canada. Both groups continue to acknowledge each other through popular debate and varying degrees of media attention since the 1960s, yet this acknowledgement and its accompanying tensions have remained largely unexplored in the literatures of both cultural groups, perhaps for fear of treading on delicate ground. In fact, literature is perhaps the only medium in which the Anglophone/Francophone fact has not been extensively discussed. Instead, we find that English- and French-language literatures both within and outside Quebec have made a quantum leap from isolated self-examination in the early stages of "nationhood" to a post-modern exploration of the ethnicities which lie outside the realm of the Anglophone/Francophone debate, thereby essentially passing over one of the relationships that has most shaped them. This affects how we view ourselves and each other. I would like to explore here one aspect of the Anglophone Canadian identity as it is portrayed both explicitly and implicitly in the literature of the "abroad" that is Quebec. My approach is based within current dialogues about ethnicity and otherness (Siemerling, Berry & Laponce), and I examine a number of parallels and differences between Anglo-Franco literatures and those of other ethnicities within Quebec.
Current debates on otherness and ethnic identity are faced with what we might call, quoting Sherry Simon, "that which maintains itself in a space between identities, in a space outside the identitary" (1991, 14). Central to this debate is a rising awareness of the tension between the desire to affirm ethnic difference and the need to efface it to give voice to individual uniqueness. Even the awareness of this tension, however, is based on a number of presuppositions: first, that ethnicity can and indeed must be defined in terms of otherness; second, that this ethnicity be given concrete manifestations in text through reference to place and cultural experience; third, that the otherness he not only expressed from within the community, but reflected from outside it as well, to provide a dynamic tension between a figure of ethnicity and the ground against which that figure may be cast (1).
I will continue to presuppose the first two points, but this last one I would like to develop further. Edward Said's work on the portrayal of Arabic cultures in the American media signifies against a ground of images chosen by and presented to members of a non-Arabic culture. The resulting contrast of visions creates a tension from which debate about the identity of Arabic cultures springs. What happens. however, if either the figure or the ground is absent or nearly so? Can identity be expressed as figure only? What is the significance of a ground without figure? My aim is to explore these questions with reference to the representation of Anglophone identity in the French language (2) literature of Quebec.
In post-colonial criticism, the ground against which ethnicity affirms itself is frequently some instantiation of the English-speaking world, seen as a pervasive and still, at least in a technological and economic sense, colonializing force against which other identities struggle to survive the world over. I would like to consider a reverse case, however: one in which the Anglophone identity is figure and another culture, Quebec's Francophone culture, ground. This scenario is rendered possible by the fact that the figure/ground aspect of ethnicity, is largely a question of demographic or psychological juxtaposition with little or no regard for the artificial barriers represented by political boundaries....
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