Transatlantic Passages: Literary and Cultural Relations between Quebec and Francophone Europe (review)

Paula Ruth Gilbert and Miléna Santoro embarked upon an important and timely exploration with this edited collection of wide interdisciplinary interest, including contributions by twenty-six authors, all of whom come from a wide variety of academic and artistic backgrounds. It is perhaps the first gift of this book that critical articles are interspersed with poems and autobiographical writings by Quebecois voices in high-quality translation, giving the reader immediate access to texts exemplifying ideas presented in the criticism. The book begins with a juxtaposition of two excerpts: one from Gail Street's My Paris and the other from Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project, collapsing past and present Parisian cityscapes and causing the reader to question the influence of gender on a writer's sense of place. The multiple authors represented and their essays provocatively suggest that sense of self and its expression are not neatly bound to geographies, cultures, and concepts in binary opposition to one another but must be considered more expansively. Thus Gilbert and Santoro create common ground among their chosen texts by employing metaphors of passages, passeurs, and passeuses, and by seeking to answer "how does the individual and collective movement/passing of people through subterranean and street-level passageways—in both time and space and at once permanent, transient, ambiguous, and liminal—connect with their intellectually critical ideas, influences, literary "production," creative impulses, and visual depictions?" (4). Some examples of passages are those traced back and forth between urban spaces (Montreal and Paris) as well as the spaces negotiated within them, and passages connecting artists to their intellectual and artistic circles or to the solitude of creating alone in one's work space. They are also built between contemporary authors whose work echoes and resonates intertextually and intratextually, describing the same place in different historical contexts, as in Karen McPherson's study of Switzerland in the Quebec imagination through the writings of Hubert Aquin and Nicole Brossard.

It is noteworthy that the first article presented in the book underscores the role of four women in seventeenth-century New France whose writings are "at the origins of the autobiographical tradition in Quebec literature" (29), so that problems of religious and cultural assimilation in Quebec are immediately presented from a female perspective, while the gaze of the flâneuse plays a predominant role through frequent references to, and regularly incorporated excerpts from, Gail Street's work. The initial essay also points to how New France began as a "dream" or construction in the European imagination, so that a question is born that soon becomes central to the work as a whole, namely, how have notions of Quebec constructed abroad created barriers to the transatlantic dissemination of knowledge about its cultural and artistic production over time?

Several authors probe this question in varied ways while autobiographical essays by artists from the world of cinema, theater, composition, print and art book-making and creative writing introduce us to their performative and material art in-transit and describe the ways in which their own passages have influenced their sense of self as artist. Notions of home as a complex interior map are also examined through essays such as Louise Forsyth's on Marie Cardinal as translator of myth and theater, wherein the author writes on why "Cardinal could not find her place in France" (148). At its most argumentative, this project includes essays on the potential dangers of establishing a world literature in French, and the shifting ground of the hierarchy once established between high and low art in the exchange of culture between Quebec and France in such forms as the bande dessinée and the art book. One final observation I am compelled to make is that this collection lends itself strikingly to a non-chronological reading, even...